My personal review of T-Mobile's Pulse
9/Jan 2010
Last month I bought a T-Mobile’s Pulse 
running Android by a bit more than £80, quite a bargain, considering that it’s a Pay as You Go phone. Not that I wanted to use it as my main personal phone, but because I wanted a second phone where to receive crap sms from work, and also because I wanted to play with the Android platform. So, I’ve used it for a month, and I’m not happy. I promise I googled before hand to read a few reviews and in most of them they talk about it in good terms. I have a different opinion.
It makes me wonder if this is just me who thinks this phone is particularly shit in general or if it’s just the model I’ve got (and, of course, if these reviews are paid anyway). This phone is based on a Huawei handset. You can go to any of the links above to read about the specs. So…
Things I do not like about it
It’s very slow and unresponsive. Both the touch screen and the physical buttons. Sometimes it’s actually unbelievable that you have to swipe your finger a few times just to get it. I wonder if it’s the screen or it’s just that the phone can’t cope with it?
Applications crash continually (Yeah, I know, it’s not a problem with android per se, but even the Servo Search included with the phone is all the time resurrecting.
It has not much memory. Phone becomes sluggish.
Battery life is awful. I mean, I thought that iPhones had it bad, but how worse can it be if you have a full battery and it runs out in 6 hours. Seriously.
Battery charging is comical. It comes with a USB cable which you connect to either the mains or a computer. It takes hours to no end (and I mean 4, 5, 6 hours, etc). Why?
More stuff, but I’ll keep my mouth shut not to be too picky.
Things I do like about it
I like the operating system. Seriously. I like that it’s open, based on Linux and highly customizable. Not only that, I like the aspect, widgets and general feeling (if only it were faster)
I like the community around it and all the apps (Android Market as opposed to iPhone Store).
You can hack it (yeah, iPhone’s too)
I like the way you can have different, say, SMS applications and choose the one you prefer to do all the notifications, readings, etc. This is clearly something you cannot do with an iPhone.
I love the browser and the google apps within it. Really nice.
And I could go on. General feeling is that I wouldn’t like it to be my main phone. And there are a ton of things I haven’t tested. Almost no phone calls, no music, no camera. You tell me.
So, if you are thinking of buying this phone, please, think it twice and look for someone who has it and use it and ask his opinion about it. I’m not sure this is a general problem with Pulses or my particular model, thus this piece of warning. Go and do your research. And, I refuse to believe that Android sucks, I think there are wonderful phones out there with Android, running newer versions and generally using better hardware. Dunno, I have tried a HTC Hero and seems a lot better. But so far, no way this is comparable to an iPhone.
Nexus One? I’d love to try one, so if you spare one, send it in my direction ;)
Have a T-Mobile Pulse? You happy with it? Let me know how, please.