T-Mobile Web n Walk

I got a new phone with T-Mobile Web n Walk Plus today. I’m impressed, it’s working better than I’d hoped. Downloads are plenty fast with HSDPA (3.5G) and configration was bearable. Websites with a mobile variant are usable at 320x240, accessing the web on my laptop, at broadband speeds, when I don’t have broadband is incredible. However, so far I’ve discovered some downsides:

1. T-Mobile run a transparent proxy. I cannot ping remote hosts, or telnet to the smtp port of my email provider.
2. The proxy recompresses JPEG images at a higher ratio. The results are very poor.

It beats the pants off WAP and all those walled gardens that mobile operators seem obsessed with. True mobile internet still isn’t quite here.