Review: Dell Aero
Text messaging works well on the Dell Aero, and the messaging interface looks great. The phone uses threaded messaging with cartoon bubbles to indicate both sides of the conversation, and the messages pop up on a transparent background with your wallpaper behind, which is a nice effect.
The phone handles picture messages and other MMS messages in an odd way. You can send a picture from the image gallery or the camera, or you can open a new message in the messaging app and find a menu to attach pics, sounds and videos to your messages. But you can't attach a picture to your messages in the threaded messaging view. Because I used the threaded view almost exclusively, since it looks much nicer, I almost missed the 'Attach Picture' feature.
When you do send an image, the text of your MMS message shows up in the threaded conversation with a bubble indicating an attached pic. Outgoing pictures went through with no trouble, but my incoming images did not arrive intact. The phone would download the image and open a slide show, but only my text would display, the image was nowhere to be found.
For email, the phone comes with a standard email app, and no Gmail. Even though this is not a “with Google” Android phone, I was still surprised, since Google Talk comes preloaded for instant messaging. In fact, Talk is the only IM app on the phone out of the box, though there are plenty more in the market.
Email on the Dell Aero was slow and unimpressive. I loaded the same Gmail account twice. Once as an IMAP account that refreshed every 15 minutes, and once as an Exchange account with Push email active. In both cases, messages arrived minutes after they showed up on my desktop and on other phones. The phone was unable to display images inline with email messages or render HTML in the email app. This truly pulls the Aero out of the smartphone world and places it squarely in feature phone territory.
The Dell Aero has the worst keyboard I've used on a smartphone. Dell claims the phone has an autocorrect feature, but in fact it seemed to be quite the opposite. Often, as I lifted my finger off a letter, the phone would change my selection to a letter nearby. The software never corrected these mistakes. So, instead of auto correcting my typing, the Aero seemed to go out of its way to force more mistakes. The keys are about the same size as those on a normal Android keyboard. If you flip the phone sideways, the Aero offers a keyboard in landscape mode. This didn't help much, because I still had the same problem of incorrect hits as I lifted my finger. I've never used an Android phone, or any modern touchscreen phone, with a keyboard that performed so poorly.
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Dell Aero
