Review: T-Mobile myTouch 3G
Android 1.5 has, thankfully, brought some solid improvements to the Gmail application. You do have the option of "starring" an email without reading it, a feature lacking on many competing mobile email platforms. Tapping an email quickly opens it, pressing and holding it opens up an options menu. In this menu, you can choose to open it, archive it, mark it unread, add a star, delete it, report spam or set labels.
Opening emails lets you see the full header and everyone the message is addressed to, the message itself, followed by some action items (reply, forward, etc.) at the very bottom of the email. Users can see and open any of the other emails that make up that conversations, just as in the Google Web-mail client. That's something I definitely wish other email clients allowed you to do.
Since the myTouch has a software keyboard, you can reply in either portrait or landscape modes. You'd better be patient, though. Switching between portrait and landscape modes takes about 3 seconds (no, not kidding here, painful!). The portrait-style keyboard strongly (too strongly) resembles that of the one on the iPhone. I can't say either was superior. Both work. It depends a lot on how nimble your fingers are and how fat-thumbed you may be. I found the myTouch to be amazingly fast. Emails showed up on the myTouch at exactly the same time as the appeared in my inbox online.
Other than Gmail, the myTouch also has two other email clients (yes, we think three separate email clients on the same device is silly, too). It has a normal POP3/IMAP client that supports accounts such as Yahoo and other service providers. It works fine.
The myTouch also includes a dedicated Microsoft Exchange email client, called "Work Email." You can set up how often email syncs to conserve batter life.
As for SMS and MMS, the myTouch gets the job done. The messaging application is where you'll see threaded SMS conversations, which is simply the best way to interact with SMS. The composition screen for SMS or MMS is the same. For an MMS, you add an attachment to an SMS message, which can be a picture, video or sound clip. Pictures taken with the myTouch are too large for MMS, so it automatically converts them to an MMS-friendly size before attaching to messages.
The myTouch also has AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo IM pre-loaded to satiate your instant message cravings.
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