T-Mobile Pulse review

There are several handsets available running the Android operating system, and they are going great guns.

T-Mobile has a few available on contract. But T-Mobile has done something unique with its Android-toting Pulse, which isn’t available anywhere else. T-Mobile has put the Pulse on prepay. It costs £180 up front.

First impressions aren’t wonderful. The Pulse is a bit large in the hand at 135x63x136mm, and it weighs 130g. That makes it just a little larger than the superb HTC Hero (but almost the same size as the iPhone).

It looks a bit blocky despite its neatly rounded corners. And the shiny plastic used for the fascia looks, well, rather ordinary, and is a magnet for fingerprints both front and back.

But to counteract all that the Pulse has room for a nicely sized screen. At 3.5-inches it matches the iPhone’s screen size, and it delivers an impressive 480x320 pixels.

There’s plenty of space, then, for viewing media rich stuff like Web pages, and importantly the on-screen Qwerty keyboard is nice and large for finger based typing.

This is especially true in wide mode. The built in accelerometer means the screen turns into wide format as you swivel the Pulse in your hands, and the wide format keyboard is particularly comfy to use.

There are a couple of buttons beneath the screen for Call and End functions. A combination back and Home button and a Menu button sit either side of a miniature trackball.

The buttons are responsive enough, but maybe their build quality has been compromised a little to help keep the costs of this handset down.

The left side has the main power button and a slot for a microSD card. A 2GB card is provided with the Pulse, but it’ll support cards to 16GB in size.

On the right side there is a camera button and volume rocker. On top a single cover protects a micro-USB connector for synching and mains power charging, and a headset connector.

Sadly, the latter is a 2.5mm connector. Aaaargh! T-Mobile clearly realises this is a point against the Pulse, as there is an adaptor to 3.5mm included.

At least it is one on a little length of cable rather than being a straight adaptor. We like this because it is less likely to put strain on the handset end connector when in use.

Another cost that has been cut is in the camera. It shoots at 3.2-megapixels, lacks flash and produced what we’d call fairly lacklustre shots. It’s probably OK for the odd quick snap, but not good for anything you want to keep longer term. There is a front camera for two way video calling.

GPS and Wi-Fi are both built in and sitting alongside the HSDPA make the Pulse very well featured indeed. The Pulse comes with a one month trial of the TeleNav SatNav software,

though that wasn’t on our review device so we couldn’t test it. There are other options available for Android, anyway, and you can buy them via the Android Market which is, of course, installed on the device.

Interestingly T-Mobile has included the RoadySync tool for Microsoft Exchange email synchronisation, so they must think that the pay as you go Android option might have appeal for companies.

There are no Facebook or Twitter applications by default, but again you can fix that with a quick visit to the Android Market.

Android has had a bit of a visual overhaul. The look isn’t as nice as that on the Hero, in our view, but you may hold a different opinion. Contacts sit in a sort of horizontally scrolling carousel, which is visually appealing.

There are only three menu screens (rather than the seven we like so much on the HTC Hero), but T-Mobile has added the innovation of Wildcard Widgets. These are often large and interactive.

So, choose the notepad one, for example, and you can create a new note simply by tapping it. There are Wildcard Widgets for calendar, email, music, pictures and video too.

T-Mobile says the battery is good for four and a half hours of talk, 300 hours on standby. We managed a good two days between charges, with a few calls and some texting and Web browsing our main activities.

Overall, the Pulse might not look as attractive as our favourite Android handset, the Hero, nor does have quite as much goodness going on right out of the box.

But the Market means you can beef up the applications library for free, and if want pay as you go it is currently your only choice.