MyTouch 4G Review

 

The T-Mobile myTouch 4G is the latest powerhouse Android phone. It is the best smartphone experience T-Mobile has to offer. A fast processor, HSPA+ Internet speeds, Wi-Fi calling, and the latest Android software meaning the myTouch 4G offers more power than its competition.

It is relatively heavy at 5 ounces and measuring 4.8 by 2.44 by .43 inches (HWD), with a metal back and a somewhat ceramicized plastic bezel. On the face of the device you have a 3.8-inch capacitive touchscreen with 480 by 800 resolution. It’s bright and responsive. The phone comes in white, black, purple and red.

The myTouch 4G runs the absolute latest version of Android, 2.2.1, on the brand-new 1 Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8255 processor with lots of T-Mobile and HTC software customizations.

The myTouch 4G has a customized version of HTC Sense UI and it’s being called the myTouch UI.

It shares a lot of features with Sense like the “Leap” feature which shows you all your home screens at once after double tapping the Home button. You get five home screens and access to the traditional Sense widgets like the Friend Stream for aggregating your social networks.

Another unique, user-friendly feature is MyModes, which lets you customize your phone for your work life and for your personal life via widgets, homescreen apps, and wallpapers. If you want to avoid work e-mail and appointments as much as possible over the weekend, you can simply set those android apps to be hidden from your homescreen when you leave your office. You can program MyModes to switch by location (using GPS), or you can switch it manually.

The Genius button lets you use your voice for multiple things like sending texts, searching for businesses and more.

This was first seen on the myTouch 3G Slide. T-Mobile has also added in things like a hands-free mode and a Car dock mode to make this more useful.

I’m still not convinced that the Genius button is necessary, as Google is making a lot of these features available with its Voice Actions apps. These will eventually be baked into the OS itself.

This T-Mobile Android phone comes with 4GB of onboard memory and an 8GB microSD card (expandable to 32GB), which should be plenty for most people.

The T-Mobile Android handset also comes with Adobe Flash Player and this works relatively well for many videos and online games.

The media player, called the Media room, handles the music, video and FM radio quite well. It also comes preloaded with Slacker and multimedia searches will even go through that Internet radio provider for tracks and stations. The Slacker is pretty cool because you can cache songs for times when you don’t have Internet connectivity.

The speed boost of the Android 2.2 brings Flash 10.1 to the browser—and, its sort of works. It’s slow. Animations can be jerky. But you can see the content, play it, and interact with it. This isn’t a desktop-quality experience, but it gets the job done.

Conclusion is T-Mobile and HTC have definitely created a winner with the myTouch 4G. The powerful processing speeds paired with HSPA+ data speeds are hard to beat when it comes to watching videos and browsing the Web. The camera is also quite good. However, if you don’t have HSPA+ available in your city, you might want to hold off on buying a myTouch 4G until coverage is expanded. You won’t be able to make video calls over the network unless you have HSPA+ connectivity, but you can still make them over Wi-Fi.


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