-
Pros
- Excellent keyboard.
- Good call quality.
- Elegant software.
-
Cons
- Not the fastest processor.
T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide Specs
| 802.11x/Band(s): | Yes |
| Bands: | 1700 |
| Bands: | 1800 |
| Bands: | 1900 |
| Bands: | 2100 |
| Bands: | 850 |
| Bands: | 900 |
| Battery Life (As Tested): | 7 hours 04 minutes |
| Bluetooth: | Yes |
| Camera Flash: | Yes |
| Camera: | Yes |
| Form Factor: | Slider |
| High-Speed Data: | EDGE |
| High-Speed Data: | GPRS |
| High-Speed Data: | HSDPA |
| High-Speed Data: | UMTS |
| Megapixels: | 5 MP |
| Operating System as Tested: | Android OS |
| Phone Capability / Network: | GSM |
| Physical Keyboard: | Yes |
| Processor Speed: | 600 MHz |
| Screen Details: | 262k-color TFT LCD capacitive touch screen |
| Screen Details: | 320x480 |
| Screen Size: | 3.4 inches |
| Service Provider: | T-Mobile |
| Storage Capacity (as Tested): | 145 MB |
The T-Mobile myTouch Slide is the perfect first Android phone for former BlackBerry, Sidekick, or texting phone users. It's well-built with an excellent keyboard and an easy-to-use interface that focuses on messaging. While the Slide isn't a "super phone" like the 
) or 
), it's an ideal starter smartphone.
The Slide is a slightly thick (4.6 by 2.4 by .6 inches HWD, 5.8 ounces) phone with a curved body of slick plastic, in white, black, or red. It's not ugly, but it won't win any design awards. Below the 3.4-inch, 320-by-480 screen there are four hard buttons and an optical touchpad. Slide the screen to the right to reveal the four-row QWERTY keyboard.
The QWERTY keyboard here is stellar. The Slide's keys are well-separated and clicky, with just the right amount of throw. While you definitely have to hold this phone in two hands to type on the keyboard, the four-row keyboard is very accurate. The only downside is the lack of a number row; you have to press the Function key to get numbers. The Slide also offers two touch keyboards and the Swype text-entry method, which lets you drag your finger over the screen quickly to form words. But there's really no reason to use the touch keyboards with the nice, slide-out QWERTY easily available.
The myTouch Slide connects to T-Mobile's and foreign 3G and 2G GSM networks. It's a good voice phone. Reception is solid. Earpiece volume and sound quality are very good. The phone doesn't go all that loud, but voices sound deep and well-rounded, and they easily jump out over background noise. The same goes for transmissions through the phone's mic; plenty of background noise comes through, but your voice is loud and clear on top of it. The speakerphone is too quiet to use in busy outdoor situations, but transmissions from the speakerphone mic sound clear. The Slide paired with my 
) Bluetooth headset. To activate voice commands, I had to hit a physical button on the phone, but I could then speak the commands into the headset. Battery life was quite good at 7 hours and 4 minutes of talk time.
Android OS and Software
T-Mobile and HTC started with Android 2.1 (including its Exchange and free GPS navigation support), but added on lots of extensions to make the Slide more cuddly and easy to use. There's a guided setup process which helps you select from one of seven themes and plug in all of your social networking and e-mail accounts, along with home-screen widgets that display recent messages from various services.
Once you're set up, you can use "MyModes" to automatically switch backgrounds, ringtones, or notifications based on your time or GPS location. There's also "Faves," a customizable screen of favorite contacts where you can see their latest status updates and call or contact them quickly.
HTC, meanwhile, contributes the Peep Twitter client, the FriendStream Twitter/Facebook client, and a new home screen layout which lets you easily jump between five configurable home screens. Other custom software here includes myTouch Music, a grab bag of a radio player that suddenly started playing Ke$ha when I launched it.
The Slide's 600 Mhz Qualcomm MSM7227 processor is par for the course in midrange Android phones nowadays. Our benchmarks show the Slide where you'd expect: faster than 528 Mhz phones like the original ), ), and ), but nowhere near as fast as 1 GHz phones like the HTC Incredible and ). Third party app performance was fine all around.
I found a few bugs. Some screens didn't pop into landscape mode when I extended the keyboard, and I occasionally got an error message that something called "htc.com.bg" had quit. But none of the bugs affected my experience much.
Multimedia and Conclusions
The Slide makes a good multimedia phone. It comes with its own media-syncing software, ), which will sync your photos, videos, and music (including iTunes playlists) to the phone from either a PC or Mac. The standard Android music player handles pretty much any unprotected music file, and music sounded good over headphones plugged into the 3.5mm headset jack or our ) stereo Bluetooth headphones. There's not much memory on board, but if you pop off the back cover you can slip in a microSD memory card. The phone comes with an 8GB card, and our 16GB Kingston card worked fine.
Videos played well as long as we weren't too demanding—stick to resolutions of 320-by-480 or smaller, and they're fine. Videos lost lip sync over a Bluetooth stereo headset, but not over a wired headset.
The myTouch's 5-megapixel camera is good for a camera phone. Bright areas tend to be overexposed and pictures are a bit washed out, but resolution and sharpness are good. In low light, there was a bit of blur from low shutter speeds, but it wasn't too bad. The camera's 0.6-second autofocus speed was slightly better than average for a midrange smartphone. The video mode records wobbly but tolerable 640-by-480 videos at 25 frames per second.
The T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide isn't a cutting-edge phone. But it's solid all around, running a recent version of Android, and it's easy to use and set up. Because they never really got hold of the Google Nexus One, T-Mobile's official lineup lacks a super-phone. That place is held by the ), which somewhat oddly retains our Editor's Choice award despite its obsolete Windows Mobile 6.5 OS because its other features, like its 4.3-inch LCD screen and 1 GHz processor, are top-of-the-line. That said, the myTouch 3G Slide will fulfill most folks' smartphone demands, especially if they're messaging addicts.
BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS
Continuous Talk Time: 7 hours, 4 minutes
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