T-Mobile Pulse Mini review

The contacts menu has also been overhauled on the T-Mobile Pulse Mini, with a new set of options on offer. You can group contacts together in the 'My Favourites' section, which offers them in a little carousel separate application.

Within the actual contacts app, there are a number of things to look at - you can see which people you talk to the most, your favourite people and (if you synchronise with your Google account) those you have starred in Android.

We're confused as to why the Pulse Mini felt it was necessary to download each contact from the Google server three or four times - and the quality of the screen was such that we simply couldn't be bothered to go in and delete everyone off that we didn't need.

Call quality is awful at times too - in areas where we usually had a good signal we couldn't hear anything through the speaker, although when out and about the bars shot up to full strength.

It's not that it's hard to call at all times, it's just very hard to predict when the T-Mobile Pulse Mini will perform well and when it will give up on you.

Messaging

Messaging options on the T-Mobile Pulse Mini are good - there's the usual SMS, MMS, Gmail and webmail synchronisation on offer.

And a little cheeky bonus for a phone of this price: push email from DataWiz via its RoadSync program is a great addition.

It works in exactly the same way as it does on much, much more expensive smartphones like the Sony Ericsson Satio - we like it a lot and are impressed T-Mobile has kept the feature from the original Pulse.

However there's a problem (another one): the T-Mobile Pulse Mini's keyboard is shocking.

Firstly, the best way to use it is with a stylus, which is something we never want to see on an Android (or any new) smartphone. This is not 2004, these aren't Windows Mobile phones.

Add to that the lag, which we mentioned before, and it's very, very hard to type out a message quickly without accidentally activating other modes.

For instance, if you long press a key, other symbols and letters pop up, which is a nice touch.

But the lag means that this frequently happens when you don't want it to, so you have to wait, reverse, and then get the message up and running again.

We feel like we're constantly pounding on the T-Mobile Pulse Mini, but in instances like this it really is so frustrating that we find we don't want to text our buddies any more.