The iPhone's biggest achievement isn't any particular feature; it's the way Apple took veto power away from the cell phone carriers.

Ordinarily, Verizon, Sprint and their rivals are the gatekeepers for phone features. If Nokia or Motorola comes up with a brilliant breakthrough, but the carrier doesn't like it, well, tough rocks. The feature goes away.
As you can imagine, this isn't a system that's conducive to innovation.

But Apple's deal with AT&T was: "We'll design what we like. We won't even tell you what the thing looks like. In return, you get an exclusive."

Maybe that departure from the usual phone maker/carrier situation was part of the inspiration behind the new T-Mobile Shadow smartphone, which went on sale last week.

This phone wasn't designed by a cell phone maker at all; according to the company, it was designed by T-Mobile's own chief executive, Robert Dotson, working with a former Apple employee. And if you believe the news release, the result is "designed to significantly reduce the complexity often associated with many feature-rich devices, while maintaining all the powerful calling, messaging and picture sharing capabilities people crave."

The resulting phone is beautiful. Its aspirations to Appleness are evident immediately: There's the nearly buttonless facade, the huge black expanse of screen, the iPod-like control dial that both spins through lists and clicks at the four compass points. It even lights up when you have messages waiting.

The back and sides have the subtlest rubbery texture, making the phone feel both soft and secure. And it's small - 4 by 2.1 by 0.6 inches, smaller than the BlackBerry Pearl - which makes it feel even more natural in your palm.
But the Shadow is intended to be a communications powerhouse. That means e-mail, chat and text messages, and that means you need a keyboard. So the phone's top and bottom halves slide apart like tectonic plates, revealing a handsome, illuminated thumb keyboard.

It's not a full keyboard of 26 submolecular keys like the one on the Treo or full-size BlackBerry. Instead, it has only 20 large, square keys -- well, large for a smartphone; they're about the size of your front teeth, so they make nice fat targets for your thumbs. It's the same system used on the BlackBerry Pearl. In fact, T-Mobile licensed the hardware design from the BlackBerry's maker, though it substituted its own software.

Most of the keys have two letters painted on them; when you press GH, UI, TY, the software figures out that you mean "guy." Unfortunately, the drawbacks of the 20-key keyboard remain the same as on the Pearl: Every now and then, the software gets it wrong. GH, UI, TY may be "guy," but it's also "hit," "gut" or "git." And proper names or unusual words -- forget about it. You have to tap those out using the multitap method, where you press the GH key twice to indicate H, and so on.

But talk about well-equipped. The Shadow has about as long a feature list as you can find on a phone.
It has a bright 320-by-240-pixel screen; an above-average two-megapixel camera with video; a memory card slot; Bluetooth, including wireless stereo music; Web browser; removable battery with five hours of talk time; speakerphone; speed-dial keys; voice dialing; and a quad-band antenna so you can use it in most other countries, if you're willing to pay steep roaming rates.

There's even Wi-Fi, so that you can Web surf at decent speeds when you're in a wireless hot spot.
Unfortunately, after they did such a great job designing the hardware, T-Mobile's chief executive and his ex-Apple designer punted on the software. They equipped this phone with Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6. As it turns out, that decision is just as much an impediment to the Shadow's greatness as AT&T exclusivity is to the iPhone.

Frankly, Windows Mobile 6 is a mess. Common features require an infinitude of taps and clicks, and the ones you need most are buried in menus. Apparently the Windows Mobile 6 team learned absolutely nothing from Windows Mobile 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

For example, if it takes four presses on the More button just to see everything in the Start menu -- and you provide no direct way to get to the first page from the last -- you need to redesign.

Now, there are certainly advantages to having Microsoft inside your phone. For example, this phone can open and edit (but not create) Microsoft Office documents. And it uses ActiveSync on a Windows PC. But overall, it's a shame that such bloated, baffling software runs a phone whose hardware is so close to perfect.

New York Times News Service