After more than a month of waiting, I am the proud owner of a new Dell Venue Pro Windows Phone.  As a Microsoft employee I had my choice on phones and carriers and I wanted to share the reasoning behind my choice.

• The T-Mobile network has great coverage in my area and where I travel.  Like all carriers today, T-Mobile has an interactive coverage map where I was able to see the quality of coverage in the areas that I care about.  When people ask me about which mobile carrier they should go with, this is the primary determining factor, I always ask them about the carrier quality in the areas that they care about.  If you can’t make call’s it’s not a phone.
• Numerous colleagues have told me that T-Mobile had great customer service.
• After using virtual keyboards on a phones for over a year, I am still horribly inaccurate.  I wanted a phone with a real keyboard that didn’t force me to reorient what I was doing.  The Dell Venue Pro has a great slide-out keyboard and when collapsed, the phone is barely bigger than my former phone, the HTC Imagio.
• The 4.1 inch AMOLED screen is very large and bright making the the graphics beautiful and the text crisp.  Because the screen uses Corning’s scratch-resistant Gorilla® Glass, I can be confident that the phone will withstand the travel pressures that I put on it.  The new Surface computer demonstrated at CES earlier this month also used Gorilla Glass.
• The phone has a solid feel and a professional look.  I’m done with flimsy-feeling plastic phones.

Great job Dell, T-Mobile, and Windows Phone!