T-Mobile UK has announced that the Pulse device will be available on pre-pay for the UK. This will be the third Android phone sold by T-Mobile – and the operator is claiming that the sales made from Android will be more than enough to make up for not having the iPhone.
What is the Pulse?
The Pulse is the long awaited full touch-screen smartphone, made specifically for T-Mobile by Huawei. First announced for MWC, and “accidentally” leaked last month, it is Huawei’s first foray into the world of Android.
It has everything you would expect from a smartphone. It has a hi-res screen, a 3.2MP camera, high-speed 3G access and access to all of the apps on the Android Marketplace. It has GPS and a compass, can access Google Maps or other navigation services, and can play a range of video or music files. So far, so smartphone.
What’s really cool about this device is the pricing. It’s one of the most wallet-friendly smartphones to hit the market so far. It comes in at 180 pounds sterling (that’s around €200 or $300), which isn’t all that steep as smartphones go. The impressive bit is the data rates – for 5 pounds a month you get unlimited data transfer. That’s right – no more pissing about with however-many pence/cent for 1MB. You don’t need to count how much you’re using, or use a ludicrous calculator like Vodafone provided. You just pay your 5 pounds for the month and get on with it. Or you can pay 1 pound for a single days access.
What we think?
This is a plain and simple smartphone. It doesn’t have anything spectacular that raises it above the competition – especially considering the slew of device releases so far this week – but it doesn’t underperform either. The best thing about it is it’s affordability.
To me, this just highlights one of the ways in which the Android can out-perform iPhone. There are so many operators and manufacturers on-board with the open OS, that the options available to the consumer are just far larger. This is part of the reason that Symbian had over 40% of the market share at the end of last year. There are simply a tonne of devices that run on Symbian – and it’s getting that way with Android. iPhone may always have a certain aura because it was the first, but that won’t be enough to stop it getting outside by Android devices. As T-Mobile UK’s head of handset marketing, Nicola Shenton said “with Android, we don’t need the iPhone.”
