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Reviews: T-Mobile’s MyTouch 4G Slide phone and Rocket 3.0 laptop stick
One of my favorite smart phones released last year was Sprint’s Epic 4G, which was speedy, had decent battery life and wasn’t too bulky considering it had a full slide-out keyboard. Now, T-Mobile customers have a worthy follow-up via hardware maker HTC. The MyTouch 4G Slide has a modest-sized screen (3.7 inches), an illuminated physical keyboard with nicely spaced-out keys and a dedicated camera button on the side.
The camera button is a key feature on the Slide because the phone’s biggest selling point is its 8-megapixel camera, which can record 1080p video and has a variety of shooting modes (close-up, action and night, for instance) and options, many more than, say, an iPhone 4. While I can’t quite rave, as T-Mobile does, that the camera has no shutter lag at all (I got plenty of blurry photos when my kids were in motion before I played around with the settings), outdoor photos and pictures taken in decent conditions do look quite good, especially compared to most smart phone cameras. The camera also has a dual-flash mode (two LEDs on the back) and a front-facing camera for video chatting.
T-Mobile’s Bobsled video chat is just one of a big bundle of apps that come pre-loaded on the Slide, including Netflix, the game “Bejeweled 2,” DoubleTwist for syncing media files, a live TV app, YouTube, Zinio for reading digital magazines, a handy flashlight app and of course, Google’s usual Android suite of email, mapping and calendar apps. The phone, which also integrates social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ in a variety of ways (some intrusive; watch your contact list if you sync with Facebook), runs Android 2.3.
T-Mobile’s own “Wi-Fi Calling” app is great for calling from overseas if a Wi-FI network is available, but unlike some free Wi-Fi calling apps, using it counts against your account minutes.
As a phone, it makes solid, clear calls without any drops in the time I tested it and the battery life on it is better than larger Android phones, but still not quite as good as the latest iPhone. T-Mobile’s At least this phone has better app management and battery-saving tools to make a dying phone last a little longer at the end of the day.
There are so many good Android phones on the market for about the same price (this one is $199 with a two-year contract), that it’s tough to recommend a particular one, but if you’re in the market for a 4G phone on T-Mobile’s network, you take a lot of photos and you need a physical keyboard, this one’s a good match for you. 4G speeds in Austin provided good web-surfing speeds and I didn’t experience any dead spots using it around town.
Another product running on T-Mobile’s 4G wireless network is the Rocket 3.0, a laptop stick the can deliver Internet to Macs or PCs via USB. Unlike Wi-Fi hotspot devices like Verizon’s MiFi or T-Mobile’s own Mobile Hotspot, the Rocket can only deliver service to one device at a time and it’s going to be a computer, not an iPad, a Wi-Fi phone or anything other than a computer that can handle it.
That being said, the device works well with the software bundled on the stick itself. I had a tough time setting it up on my Mac, but that had more to do with having had the software installed on a previous computer and moving it over to the new system than a problem with the device. On my older computer, the Rocket worked fine and I eventually got the stick to work on my new computer after an upgrade to OS X Lion, Apple’s new operating system.
The Rocket has a microSD card built in, allowing you to store files on it as well. In Austin and New Braunfels where I lived, the 4G service was reliable and I got speeds of as high as 15 Mbps download speeds and 1.5 Mbps upload speeds, which rivals my Road Runner Standard home broadband speeds. That sounded great to me until I saw that T-Mobile is advertising the stick as being capable of 42 Mbps download speeds, which I never came close to achieving. Speeds in Austin were less consistent: even in the middle of downtown Austin, it was sometimes as low at 8 or 9 Mbps with upload speeds dropping to about .5 Mbps. I’m not sure if that has to do with more network congestion in Austin, but it’s a little disappointing.
From the website speedtest.net, a test from my home in New Braunfels.
Slower speeds in downtown Austin.
The Rocket 3.0 also comes with a short USB cable in case the stick can’t fit where your laptop’s USB ports are and can swivel in the port to keep from blocking other connection or wires. It has different-colored faceplates (which seem unnecessary, but they’re included anyway). The device costs $80 with a two-year contract and mobile broadband plans start at about $40 for 2 gigabytes of data (which isn’t much if you plan to utilize those 4G speeds with video and big file downloads).
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