Al1UK.com

Better late then never…..or so they say :o

I originally ordered the black phone but T-Mobile fucked up and sent me the white one and to get a black one is a long process, so I’ve decided to stick with it.

Anyway, first impressions:

The design is very nice despite what people say about the ‘chin’. The screen is very bright, even with low brightness settings, it looks a bit too bright. Soon after I got it, I noticed a very subtle but annoying creaking noise on the bottom right of the screen. Apparently, this is something to do with left over plastic during the manufacturing process and can be cut away. But when you buy a phone like, you expect not to come across issues like this. T-Mobile will be sending me out a replacement.

The keyboard is very difficult to see in the light when the backlight on the keyboard is on. Even sitting here with a room light, it’s difficult to see. But apart from that, it’s a very good keyboard, feel very solid. I hear the black keyboard doesn’t have the same issues.

The trackerball, I love this thing. It has a fuzzy feeling when you use it, it feels strange but good . My only gripe with it is I wish you could speed up the scrolling process with it, it keeps a constant speed when using it, unlike the finger swipe.

No problems with the other buttons, although they have the same seeing-in-the-light issues as the keyboard, but given they are 4 simple buttons, you won’t notice after a while.

After booting, I set it up with my gmail account, no issues there. The UI looks very clean, but some of the info is difficult to find, like battery info, which I found after using AnyCut (which is a great piece of software).

One problem I did find was with the Email software, you can’t use ‘Always use SSL/TLS’ unless you have a cert signed by a proper authority The workaround for that is to select ‘Using SSL/TLS if available’.

Hmm..let’s see, what else….

The speaker is really loud and clear. The Market app is very useful, I’ve used it more then I expected. I also finally got a chance to test my irc app on a real phone \o/ One disappointment was apps don’t automatically switch orientation, you have to open the keyboard for that. (It can be done, but needs to set in the AndroidManifest.xml file before shipping, but after that, the orientation only relies on the sensor and not the keyboard.)

T-Mobile also threw in a 8GB memory card (!) in addition to the 2GB that already came with the phone…nice! Sadly, no sign of the usb to 3.5mm headphone converter there have been rumors about.

That seems to be all for now, final recommendation, get it if you like it, but stick with the black model and don’t expect the glamor and wow factor of the iPhone.

My contract ( ) is £20 p/m with £7 p/m insurance and £100 for the phone. With that comes 100 mins + 100 texts (cross network) and unlimited (?) web usage in accordance with their Fair Usage Policy. (That means no 700Mb film downloads via the phone…yes I’m talking to you!) Quite expensive heh, but that was the cheapest plan they had (Yeah, I’m a cheapskate, so what? It’s this Credit Crunch, it’s killing me man )