T-Mobile has officially transformed the myTouch brand into a franchise with its new phone, the myTouch 3G Slide. The first thing you notice with this phone is the carrier specific, custom skin that is built right onto HTC’s Sense GUI for the Android OS (Operating System). The phone comes shipped in a hard plastic shell that has foam with cutouts that neatly fits the phone and all of the accessories that it comes with. This includes: headphones, a charger, and the manuals. The best part is that once you take the phone out of the neat little packaging, it looks way better than the pictures make it, so that’s a nice little surprise.
The screen on the phone is plenty bright, without being over the top, and helps keep everything easily visible. The four-row keyboard design is great, despite the fact that it rubs on the back of the screen when sliding. Obviously, this isn’t a problem, or they would have done something about it before releasing this successor to the G1. All of the important keys are there, and you don’t even need to press shift or alt to get most of the normally used characters such as “@”, which you will use more than most phone makers think apparently, because they make it only usable after pressing alt or shift. The headphone jack and the power button are on the top, while a volume rocker sits on the left, a micro-USB port appears on the bottom and on the right side, you have your camera button, which, in two presses will take a focused shot with the 5 megapixel camera. Unfortunately, the 5 megapixels do nothing for the image quality, as it is literally impossible to get a clear picture that is free from noise or splotches. The noise quality fairs better, with the speaker clearly audible even when the phone placed down (as it is on the backside).
Overall, the myTouch 3G Slide is a well-designed phone with only one major flaw residing in the rubbing when sliding. Other than that T-Mobile has done a great job providing a new feel to HTC’s Sense, which we all already know works so well on the Android Operating System. Looking down the road, we might actually see many carriers following T-Mobile’s suit for a change, and offering carrier customized GUIs built on top of Sense for their Android phones.
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