T-Mobile Pulse Mini deals & review

The Android avalanche takes another turn for affordable entry level Android smartphones with T-Mobile offering the Pulse Mini from the China-based Huawei, one of the world’s leading supplier of 3G mobile networking equipment.  

The new T-Mobile Pulse Mini comes in black or white body color and gets slapped with a SIM-free £99.99 price on a Pay As You Go tariff allowing more people to own an Android without closing their bank accounts. Compared with the earlier Pulse likewise sourced from Huawei, the Mini version runs the latest Google Android 2.1 Éclair OS running on the Qualcomm MSM7225 engine while stepping down on a number of features on the Pulse released last October. This is arguably one of the best value smartphones in the market.

Minimized Pulse Features

The Mini goes from quad band to tri band GSM with class 10 GPRS/EDGE connectivity on the 2G network. While they share the same dual band UMTS on 3G, the Mini just gets HSDPA at 3.6 Mbps instead of the 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 2 Mbps HSUPA on the Pulse. Both have the same WiFi 802.11b/g and local data connectivity options for wired USB 2.0 and wireless Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP. SatNav features with A-GPS support are likewise provided.

Display real estate and technology goes down from a 3.5-inch half-VGA capacitive touchscreen with multitouch to a 2.8-inch QVGA resistive touchscreen with the same 256k color and accelerometer auto rate support. Imaging carries the same 3.2 megapixel resolution with video recording.

Though you now get LED flash, you lose the autofocus feature on the Pulse. Both get geo tagging from their GPS receivers. The Mini gets an edge with a secondary video call VGA camera up front.

Multimedia entertainment benefits from the same media playback support for MP3/WAV/WMA/eAAC+ audio file codecs and MP4/H.264/H.263 video formats. Both Pulse and Mini have no FM radio and the Mini gets another edge with an industry standard 3.5mm audio jack where the Pulse only had a special 2.5mm one. Both have Bluetooth A2DP support for wireless stereo listening.

The decent onboard 192 MB memory of the Pulse gets up to 300 MB on the Mini with a phonebook capacity for almost unlimited entries and fields and the same microSD external memory expandability.

Software-wise, the Android 2.1 OS allows up to 15 homescreens that let you customize each with widgets and shortcuts unique to each homescreen, like having 15 different handsets in one.   The T-Mobile Pulse Mini is preloaded with apps for social networking integration and live updates as well as YouTube. It comes with Google Talk client for IM, Google Search and SatNav aids like Google Maps. There’s also a document viewer for MS Office and PDF files, HTML browser with Flash support, Gmail and email client.