Review: T-Mobile Pulse smartphone

T-Mobile's Pulse touch-screen smartphone is a low-cost handset based on Google's Android platform, and the first to be available on a pay-as-you-go tariff. With a user-friendly interface and built-in access to services such as YouTube plus messaging, the Pulse is aimed at consumers who want to stay in touch with their friends.

Launched in September and available since the end of October, the Pulse is built exclusively for T-Mobile by Huawei and is SIM-locked to that network. It costs £179.99 on pay-as-you-go, but is also available free on a £30 per month contract for 24 months.

Based on Android OS version 1.5, the Pulse is worth considering for anyone who regularly uses Google services such as Google Mail, although we would not recommend it for anyone wanting to do a lot of email or messaging, as the lack of a physical keyboard makes entering text a real pain.

In design, the Pulse looks rather retro to our eyes, resembling a Microsoft Pocket PC from five or six years ago rather than a sleek modern handset. Nevertheless, the Pulse has a capacitive touch-screen and supports HSDPA, Wi-Fi, built-in GPS and Bluetooth, all standard features on current-generation smartphones, and it certainly seems to have decent build quality.

At 130g, the Pulse is slightly lighter than Apple's iPhone but, apart from both having a 3.5in 320 x 480 touch screen, there is little in common between these two devices.

T-Mobile has equipped the Pulse with its Canvas user interface, which basically delivers a workspace consisting of six contiguous screens that you can move between by flicking a finger on the screen or pressing the trackball to zoom out and get a bird's eye overview of the whole workspace.

Like other Android handsets, the screen is customisable, and you can drag applications and other screen furniture anywhere you want. Users can add shortcuts and widgets to the desktop, while a unique feature to the Pulse is Widcards, which provide a kind of live shortcut to calendar entries, emails and the like.

By default the central home screen has a clock, and links to key tools such as phone dialer, email and T-Mobile's web'n'walk for browsing. The screen next to this holds all the Google tools, such as a search bar, Google Maps, Google Mail, Google Talk, and Android Market for downloading further applications to the handset.

The phone's browser provides a fairly good web surfing experience in our opinion, but does not support Flash-based content.

Persistent at the bottom of the screen are two buttons, one linking to a favourites list of most regularly accessed contacts, while the second links to the application menu. Beneath the screen, a menu button brings up a context-sensitive menu on the home screen or inside applications, while a back button takes you back a step.

Like other Android handsets, the Pulse is pretty simple to get started with, as you simply touch the functions on the screen that you want to access, and it feels very natural to just drag around objects and tap the relevant on-screen controls.

However, relying on a touch-screen for all input does have its drawbacks, and we found entering text into the on-screen keyboard of the Pulse to be an exercise in frustration. We found we were mistyping so often that the delete key was the one we used the most frequently, and entering passwords and Wi-Fi security keys is further complicated because the screen hides the characters as you type.

These are difficulties we have found on many touch-screen phones, but the Pulse seems particularly bad, while we had few such problems with the HTC HD2, for example. We also found that the keyboard changes orientation when you twist the phone round in some applications - in Messaging, for example – but not others, such as Google Search.

One neat feature, however, is that you can choose between three keyboard layouts to suit your preference: a full Qwerty, a T9-style, and one resembling the SureType layout of some BlackBerry phones. You just change layout by flicking the keyboard sideways, and a new one slides in to replace it.

The Pulse comes with a number of pre-installed applications, such as Google Mail, Google Maps and Google Talk, plus trial versions of Documents To Go and RoadSync from DataViz, which provide viewing capabilities for Microsoft Office files and access to Microsoft Exchange email servers respectively.

Pulse buyers also get a free 30-day trial of TeleNav's satellite navigation tool, but this requires users to download the application from a URL listed in the documentation provided with the phone.

The beauty of having Google Mail as part of the Android platform is that existing users can instantly access their email, calendar and contacts on the Pulse, although our test handset would only synchronise emails by default until we found the check boxes to tell it to include calendar and contact details. Once configured, users can update their calendar and other information on the PC, and the changes automatically appear on the handset, and vice versa.

Of course, the Pulse is little use without a Google account, as it makes clear the first time you switch it on. The handset asks you to sign in, or create an account if you do not have one. It also displays a dire-sounding warning about Google's location service, which uses data from the phone network to locate you for applications such as Google Maps, but you can choose to use GPS as the source instead.

The Pulse has a 1500mAh lithium polymer battery, which can be removed by sliding off the rear cover of the handset. T-Mobile quotes this as delivering talk time of up to four hours, and standby time up to 12 days. We found the phone used up a complete charge in less than a day during our tests.

The phone also has a 3.2-megapixel camera, which produced slightly murky looking images in our tests, but is probably acceptable for taking snapshots.

T-Mobile also supplies the Pulse with a 2GB Micro SD Flash card that fits into a slot on the left hand side of the case, protected by a cover. Another cover protects the Micro USB slot on the top of the phone for synchronisation and recharging, next to which is a 2.5mm jack socket for the supplied audio headset.