Motorola A630 Phone (T-Mobile)
Good phone, minor flaws. Mediocre email
This phone is good for the price, but if you really want a good mobile email solution, get a Sidekick II.<br /><br />Positive:<br /><br />The A630 has good sound quality, and absolutely fantastic sound quality if you use a bluetooth headset. T-Zones service is an inexpensive way to gain access to your POP3 email accounts. It has a keyboard. You can download pictures to and from your computer using a bluetooth connection (I did this using my Mac).<br /><br />Negative:<br /><br />The built-in email software is very poorly designed. It is sloooo[...] It requires way too many key clicks to accomplish common tasks. The most common email commands are buried in the menus, the least common commands occupy the prime spots. Someone didn't think about this enough. It takes me 7 clicks to delete a message -- that's too much. They don't take advantage of the keyboard enough: The keyboard has a Delete key, but you can't use it to delete a message. That's a waste. Likewise, you have to scroll through your emails one...line...at...a...time. Why not use the space bar as a quick scroller, like in Outlook? To issue a command, you have to use the menu and arrow keys. They should have assigned letter or number keys to each menu command so you can navigate more quickly with single keypresses. (My old Sony-Ericsson phone had this feature)<br /><br />The case is pretty, but because it's perfectly symmetrical, you can't tell which end is up by feel alone. The keyboard is so slick that you can't dial by feel either -- you need to look. These are safety issues. (but if you have a headset, you can dial by voice)<br /><br />So far, the battery doesn't last more than a day with below-average use.<br /><br />The A630 is best for people who want bluetooth, and who primarily talk or text, and who use POP3 occasionally, or not at all.