T-Mobile Tap Review

Introduction:

Huawei may not have the brand recognition here in the United States, but nonetheless they’re going to try to penetrate the market here with the T-Mobile Tap. However, this lightweight and compact touchscreen phone has numerous devices to compete against on T-Mobile’s lineup. The Tap is looking to dive head-on into fierce competition with hopes of coming out strikingly unique – let’s see if it has what it takes to win over customers looking for a refreshing new experience.

The package contains:
•    T-Mobile Tap
•    Stereo Headset
•    USB Cable
•    Start Guide
•    User Guide

Design:

From a first glance, we’ve seen the T-Mobile Tap’s design on plenty of other devices – so it doesn’t stand out as being too fancy. The conservative approach with the candybar form factor makes for a decent sized handset that’s not overbearing with its rounded corners. One item we did find nice was the soft touch material encompassing the entire body of the phone – so it always looks clean and provides for a good grip. It’s more than compact (0.5” thick) and lightweight (3.7 oz) to slip into any pocket inconspicuously without the added baggage. Fortunately, it is well constructed and radiates a sense of durability – so it’ll withstand some of the normal daily grinds that phones are put through.



You can compare the T-Mobile Tap with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

Turning on the T-Mobile Tap for the first time will greet you to its 2.8” resistive LCD screen that has a resolution of 240 x 320 with support for 262k colors. Other than the tight confines, we really had to push down hard on the screen for it to recognize a press – luckily the pressure from a fingernail is a bit easier to register. Aside from being able to see clearly when brightness was set to the highest setting, the screen didn’t seem as sharp as we would’ve liked it to be. Text looked a bit fuzzy at times and colors didn’t have stronger tones to make it jump out. The Tap also suffered from some poor viewing angles – you can’t see what’s on-screen if it’s placed at more than a 45 degree angle from either direction. In addition, you’ll have to shade the phone from the sun if you’re trying to use it outdoors in direct sunlight.



The buttons found below the screen follow the conservative stance that we’ve seen so far. The end, send, and navigational pad are sized large enough to press without issues. The other keys hugging the sides of the phone are a bit trickier to press – specifically the tiny sized power button on the top edge.

Software/Features:

For anyone that’s played around with one of Samsung’s TouchWiz devices, you’ll instantly recognize the commonalities that the Tap’s interface utilizes. On a sour note, it’s nowhere on the same level that TouchWiz offers in looks and depth. It attempts to emulate Samsung’s venerable interface with its own panel of widgets on the left side of the home screen. Some are of course more useful than others – there’s a good majority that are just shortcut icons to launch the application. There’s also a row of four icons on the bottom portion of the screen that acts as a general bridge to common functions. There are some slight hints of slowdown experienced on the phone – transition effects that are used extensively when navigating on the phone looked slow to execute. It’s a nice start for Huawei, but it fails to really achieve captivating us with its boring looking interface.



Composing a text message can be either a swift or excruciating experience depending on what method you use. We actually preferred using the traditional portrait keypad with T9 on; which allowed us to send messages with less hiccups. When turning the phone to its side to display the on-screen QWERTY keyboard, we found it unusable when attempting to speed type a message – we made too many mispresses and would best describe it as unresponsive.

For its IM client, the T-Mobile Tap features Nimbuzz that will get you into popular ones like Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, and MSN Messenger. It even provides you access to other messaging clients on MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. The downside to it is that you’ll need to create a new account with Nimbuzz to gain access to any of the specific providers mentioned.



The email client sports automatic configuration for the popular services, but if your provider is not in the list, it will ask specific mail server addresses in order to be loaded on the Tap. Once completely set up, we noticed it displays all your mail folders like you would see them on a computer. We liked how simple the interface is laid out that enables users to quickly organize their messages.



If you’re looking for third party applications on the T-Mobile Tap straight out of the box, you’d better look elsewhere because there are slim pickings. TeleNav GPS is offered and does everything we’ve seen it perform on other handsets – so it’ll be your guide during road trips. There’s even Google Maps for an alternative location based application at your finger tips. Other than that, there are other tools at your disposal like the calendar, memo, alarm, calculator, converter, world time, FM radio, stopwatch, and timer.




After taking photos with the 2-megapixel camera on the Tap, we were horrified that they looked extremely poor on the phone. After viewing them on a computer, we noticed that they lacked sharp details and produced neutral color tones. Outdoor shots in bright lighting conditions produced the best quality while indoor photos had a darker tone to them. The camera taking interface is extensive with two rows of icons on-screen – it offers a ton of options to modify from scene modes to white balance. It’s not to say that photo quality from the Tap isn’t bad, but it would make do for most people.




With a maximum shooting resolution of 320 x 240, videos on the T-Mobile Tap are best reserved for quick sharing via MMS. Right off the bat we noticed at how extremely pixelated captured video looked with some noticeable frame skipping during recording. Sound from the produced video also didn’t fare too well – it was muffled sounding with a prominent static noise and we had difficulty comprehending words. Yeah, we’d gather that video recording on the Tap should be just reserved for those quirky moments you don’t want to remember.

After being exposed to a lackluster looking interface on the phone, we were expecting the same with the music player. To our surprise, it looked more up-to-date than anything else with its visual equalizer running as a song is played. Other than missing the ability to display an album cover, we found the music player simple and easy to use. Even when the speaker phone’s volume was placed at its maximum, it didn’t produce any crackling.

Touchscreen handsets tend to be more suitable for viewing videos, but the T-Mobile Tap was plagued by choppy playback to prevent it from being a decent experience. After playing two movie trailers coded in MPEG-4 at 320 x 240 and H.264 at 320 x 136, there was some substantial slowdown during certain intervals. Luckily we had no problems with sound from the videos – tones were distinct and audible with no hint of crackling.



There is roughly 156MB of shared memory available if you plan on saving media directly on the device. To support that, it can accept microSD cards up to 16GB in capacity.

Taking the handset to other countries for voice calls won't be an issue with it's quad-band GSM capability (850/900/18000/1900 Mhz). For data use, the dual-band UMTS support (1700/2100 Mhz) is sufficient enough to get good connections on T-Mobile’s AWS band.

When some basic phones are packed with more than half-way browsers like Opera Mini, we are baffled with the regression of the browsing experience on the Tap. Our site took over 2 minutes to completely load up – with the phone constantly refreshing the screen to render everything correctly. Once fully loaded, we found the scrolling experience unresponsive; requiring numerous swipes of the finger to get where you want to be. Zooming in and out can be accomplished by pressing the magnifying icon which then gives you a bar to move to a specific level. With the nightmarish experience, we were dismayed at how poorly the web browser performed – it’s downright appalling for a touchscreen phone.

Performance:

Switching over to the phone calling side of the Tap, conversations were drowned out by the hissy static noise in the background. Even when volume was set to its lowest, we could still hear the noise. Placing that glaring issue aside, voices on both ends were clear to comprehend. When using the speaker phone, our caller’s voices did sound as if they were on a walkie talkie because of the high pitched static noise as we conversed. With so much interference during all of our phone calls, we were disappointed with its quality.

While testing out the T-Mobile Tap, we did notice that it held a better connection to the network than other phones. No dropped calls whatsoever and it retained better 3G connections as well.

By far the best thing that we tested out on the Tap was its battery life – we managed to get an astounding 12 hours of continuous talk time before the battery completed went dead. That’s some feat to achieve when you consider the manufacturer’s rated talk time of 5 hours and 240 hours on standby.

Conclusion:

Being still new to the US market, Huawei needs some work on future handsets if they plan on being competitive in this market. The T-Mobile Tap displays everything that a first time handset should not do if they really want to provide a compelling handset to customers. Facing stiff competition from other similar touchscreen phones, the T-Mobile Tap is littered with too many problems that need some fine tuning to become somewhat at least usable. Although Huawei has finally tapped into a major wireless provider in the US, its offering leaves us questioning whether or not they will survive with a handset like the T-Mobile Tap.

T-Mobile Tap Video Review: