Fancy a smartphone but don’t feel like handing over a pound of flesh to your operator every month? You want the T-Mobile Pulse, then. It’s one of the latest cellies slicked out with Google’s Android software, and the first to drop on pay as you go. But does a knock down cost come with knocked out features? Read on to find out in our T–Mobile Pulse review.
The T-Mobile Pulse is a refreshing change for fans of Google’s mobile microbot, and not just because it’s the first Android phone to come without a chin Bruce Forsyth would be proud of. At a shade under 180 notes up front with no network sleights of hand on your wallet, it’s also the cheapest Android blower yet, but we’re left wondering where T-Mobile and Huawei, the Chinese chaps making sure they roll off the factory conveyor belt, took shortcuts to slash the price.
When it comes to a smartphone drag race, the T-Mobile Pulse is still specced out more than respectably, with 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS to match even top class Android phones like the HTC Hero. The camera’s nothing that’ll worry Annie Leibovitz though at an average 3.2 megapixels, but Huawei’s also put a ginormous 3.5-inch touchscreen in. That’s bigger than any of its Android rivals and it’s sharper than a Samurai sword.
Like it cousins, the T–Mobile Pulse has got homescreen access to the Android Market so you can load up on apps, and the screen size doesn’t affect compatibility with any phone progs we ran. Like Android mainstay HTC, T-Mobile’s taken a toolbox to Google’s operating system and grafted its own custom skin on top of it.
And like HTC’s Sense layout, it lets you flick between multiple homescreens with different widget layouts for work and play you can rejig and customise as much as you like. In truth though, it’s not quite as pretty as Sense, there’s no integrated Twitter and putting the screens on top of each other in a 3×2 grid is a bit daft, especially if you lock your phone and then forget where you are on it.
But look at this way. If you can live with a slightly wider, chunkier phone than the HTC Hero, and for a lot less you can now get a mobile that matches it in almost every feature. Our only major gripe with the T-Mobile Pulse is the truly poor video support, but that’s true of every Google chatbox so far. Otherwise, kudos to T-Mobile: you can now upgrade to a fully fledged smartphone without having to upgrade your salary too.
