Keyboards: I used two of the candybar-style phones before the Dash. I loved having the querty keys when I got it. Accuracy was a bit of an issue, but overall it was very fast. With practice I'm as fast on the Shadow for text input if not faster! Compared to a traditional phone xT9 is much better at guessing when it only has to pick between two words. The Dash implementation of xT9 just doesn't work as well... not sure if it's due to the Dash's available memory limiting the dictionary or something else but there's a definite difference between the two.
Screen Orientation: I found I had more applications going back to portrait. There are a number of things (especially games) that were never updated to work with landscape screens. For me it felt like Christmas getting a whole bunch of new applications for free (I'd already purchased them for a previous phone but they didn't work with the Dash). I do agree that Landscape is nice for web pages, but with "one column" mode it's not a huge difference. Everything is squished anyway.
Speed:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Temporale
Intel has done a great job of making us think that the speed of your computer relates 100% to the speed of your CPU. And that's just not the case at all.
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That or the extra 64MB of RAM! With my Dash I was always dying a slow death from 16MB down to 0MB. The Shadow has over 64MB of
free RAM at boot and always seems to have that available if I close all my applications. That means the Dash has 48MB of memory in use at boot and the Shadow 64MB. Perhaps that extra 16MB of in-use memory contributes to the system performance, since whatever is running there doesn't have to be fetched from ROM.