We love the little green robot that is Google's Android operating system, so we're happy to see it nudging into the inexpensive world of pay-as-you-go phones, thanks to T-Mobile's Pulse. The Pulse isn't going to set the world on fire with smoking good looks or stunningly innovative features, but it does a very respectable job nevertheless. Once it's tweaked out with your favourite Android apps, the Pulse should leave you satisfied, and with some change left in your wallet.
The Pulse is available from T-Mobile for £180. You'll also need the Internet Booster, which includes unlimited access to the tubes (with a 1GB fair-use policy) for £5 per month. T-Mobile told us that the Pulse will also be available on a contract in the future, but it couldn't confirm the price.
The people's Android
The Pulse is the first phone to bring the Android operating
system to the pay-as-you-go masses, so we're happy to see that T-Mobile hasn't let us
down by shipping a cheap and nasty knockoff. The Pulse isn't fancy -- its
black plastic body is nothing to write home about, and its trackball feels rather wobbly. But, with a big, 89mm (3.5-inch) screen -- it's the biggest
screen on any Android phone out there -- it's nothing to be ashamed of.
When you're relying on a touchscreen, with few buttons to fall back on, responsiveness is everything. We found the Pulse's screen sufficiently sensitive, but the hamster inside couldn't quite run quickly enough on its wheel for the phone to respond quickly in all applications. For example, scrolling around the three home screens is fast and responsive, but typing on the soft keyboard requires a slow and steady hand. When we typed at top speed, letters were dropped, and the predictive text can't help when only half the letters are registered. The Pulse is also deathly slow to start up and resume after sleeping.
Normally, we'd crucify a touchscreen handset that can't cut the mustard in the keyboard department, but the Pulse has so much to offer that can't help but cut it some slack. For instance, it offers the choice of three keyboards in both landscape and portrait orientations: full Qwerty, an alphanumeric layout and a compressed Qwerty option such as we've seen on smaller BlackBerry models, like the BlackBerry Pearl 8120. They all support predictive text, although we found the word suggestions to be dodgy at times, and a great feature that allows you to slide down on the key to type a secondary character, like a number or symbol.
Tiny tweaks on a
solid foundation
T-Mobile -- or, to be accurate, Huawei, the manufacturer of the Pulse -- has
added a few tweaks to the bog-standard version of Android. For example, there are
some widgets for the home screens, which it calls 'wildcards', that display your
videos, pictures and other treasures. There's also a fancy address book
application that shows you your favourite contacts in a Cover Flow-style
carousel of photos, which you can tap to dial. So far so fine, but there's
nothing overly innovative here compared to the fancy social-networking features on
other Android handsets, like the HTC Hero
or the Motorola
Dext. They're solid, useful features, but Android is
the real star of the show.
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User reviews4
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jimmielin 25 January 2011
Good: Price is cheap. Quite a few custom ROMs out there. Feels solid for its price.
Bad: Sluggish at times, lack of RAM, camera is worse than the VGA front in an iPod Touch, Autofocus is terribly slow, Front Camera is useless (good lighting: it gets too white. bad lighting: nothing at all. normally: you look green.), trackball is awful, buttons feel too cheap, can't make decent calls and/or get decent signal, drops GPRS signal constantly, rarely gets 3G unless in a very well covered area, ringer/call speaker is not loud enough, back speaker's sound quality is awful.
Comment: Obviously it's a great phone for hopping into the Android ecosystem, but although it's *awesome* for its price, it can't go much further. It's both cameras are crap, even worse than a who-knows-how-old camera phone with 1 megapixel. The VGA camera is just there for decoration. The back 3.2 MP one works well for Macro Shots when well lightened, it gets awfully blurry when taking normal shots, and autofocus is terribly slow. It can't get a better quality picture than a 1.0 MP Fixed-Focus one, so if you're buying a phone for its take-anywhere camera, don't get it.
Comes with Android 1.5, buggy, laggy, not to mention often crashes. Works well for frequent SMS-ing though. There are custom ROMs for Android 2.1 and some are challenging 2.3, but that's pretty much everything.
Slow as hell bootup time, and I usually shut it down by taking out the battery. shutdown is slow as hell, too.
Ringer is terrible, and proprietary microphone/headphone port means you're pretty much stuck with the one that was given to you, which is terrible.
Not a good phone, but it's pretty much a training wheel for Android.
jaminbob 25 October 2010
Good: Affordable Android phone, with music, internet and other bells and whistles.
Bad: Awful at making actual phone calls, often unreliable, often unresponsive, needs factory reset every other month, buggy.
Comment: Despite having it for over a year, I still sometimes pinch myself when using this phone. Being able to view most Internet pages, check train and bus times, having access to a world of incredible applications, playing music and games and being able to do all of that anywhere and some of it at the same time still amazes me.
But most Android phones can do all that and whilst this was affordable at the time, I would recommend getting a newer phone at the price point this was when released.
This phone suffers from unreliability and it has become absolutely awful at making actual phone calls, refusing to connect, ignoring the request or crashing. The spell checker also crashes, and there are numerous other glitches. To fix these a factory reset will help and you will end up doing this every month or two.
A great introduction into the SmartPhone world for me, but its definitely time to upgrade.
Anton Lappin 29 July 2010
Good: easy to use
Bad: very unreliable
Comment: at first its a great phone, has a poor camera but its other features make up for it. However after a month of usage it becomes slower, less responsive and the android market, its main source, stops working. It can be fixed but it repeats this pattern frequently so it because more annoying and less reliable as a basic phone.
See all 4 user reviews