Reviewing a Android phone is actually a thing to look forward to, owing to its interesting features and all the hoopla that the Google punch actually makes it. It is obvious that the same thing happened with me, when we received MTS Pulse?all clad in sophistication and style. The smartphone runs on Android 2.1, which is slightly dated but, not too bad.
The first thing that came into my mind was its looks, touchscreen response and the overall performance, because features were bound to be interesting.
At a basic level, the phone is HTC Pulse (co-branded by MTS) and is the first operator-subsidised smartphone in the country. It is powered by a 528 MHz ARM 11 processor and has HTC?s customised Sense user interface running on top of the operating system (OS).
Let us start with the body features of the handset. MTS Pulse is integrated with a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen display along with CDMA mobile network support. Clad in sybaritic black colour, the handset has a trackball for scrolling and selection installed at the centre, which gives a very good response. Moreover, there are other nicely designed touch buttons for landing onto the homepage, searching a string and landing back onto the previous page. Moving further, the phone comes with a slot for USB cable at the bottom and an expansion slot for microSD card. At the back of the curvy body of the handset, there is an well-integrated 5 megapixel camera with auto focus and digital zoom capabilities.
The Pulse is a CDMA/EVDO phone, which means there?s no SIM card. But in every other way, it operates just like any other Android touchscreen phone, with all the Google services, social networking features, push mail and Android marketplace intact. Overall, the handset scores quite a few numbers on its looks and also earn points on its capabilities with respect to the camera and touchscreen response.
Moving to the interface and applications, the phone is installed with Android v2.1, which offers quite nice looking interfaces. A special mention should be made of MTS? network, which performed flawlessly most of the time (even for streaming video using YouTube or the pre-loaded MTS TV app). No issues to report with call quality, though in certain locations, signal strength would drop to just one bar, indicating that network coverage is an area that needs working on. Further, the MTS TV worked really well and the buffering time was also quite short. The Pulse comes with support for media formats like MP4, H.264 and WMA plus some others as well. It comes pre-loaded with all basic Google applications like YouTube, Google Talk, Gmail, Picasa etc.
The handset comes with a charger, USB cable, headset and a manual. The MTS Pulse is available in 5 ways as dished out by MTS scheme. The company is offering ways to purchase the phone that includes the best one being paying a monthly rent of R1,500 and getting the handset for free and free 1,500 minutes (local and national), 1,500 SMS and 1,500 MB of data download every month. One also has the option of buying the phone on credit card through EMI scheme or paying R16,000 upfront for the handset and then choosing any of their tariff plans.
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