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I decided to say farewell to my Motorola MPx220 in favor of the new, sexy T-Mobile SDA (really a rebranded HTC Tornado).

So far, I’m very pleased with Windows Mobile 5. Everything just feels more polished when comparing it to the 2003 version that my MPx220 ran. Managing devices with Bluetooth is much improved. Tying a Bluetooth device to a COM port is simple and straightfoward, you don’t need the hackish BTSerialCom program. Pairing my car, headset, gps device, and computers were simple. The device is smart enough to know if the computer can do ActiveSync when pairing, so you don’t have to deal with the headache of configuring Bluetooth+ActiveSync anymore.

The screen on the SDA is QVGA (240×320, quarter of VGA) - while it is only 64k colors it looks very nice because of how tight the pixels are packed. My brother picked up Verizon’s XV-6700 and it has the same screen specs, but it is a bit larger and the display isn’t as crisp.

The phone construction is very solid too. The only complaint I have about the design is how small the buttons are. This is a forgivable design decision though, it’ll just take some getting used to.

The ActiveSync integration seems much nicer. It took no time at all to install the self-signed certificate on the phone and then to get up and synchronized to an Exchange 2003 SP2 server over SSL. Tasks can now be synchronized as well, so I may actually start using them. I can’t wait for T-Mobile to release a ROM update for the Messaging and Security Feature Pack (MSFP, AKU2, or whatever the cool kids call it now), which should bring the delicious push email my way. Hopefully we’re not too far behind the goal set out in the Netherlands by T-Mobile and Microsoft in this press release.