As mentioned in my previous post, I decided to give the MNVO Helio a go with its new, sexy Drift phone. In this post I’ll be listing my experiences with it over the last 11 days or so. Some of my comparisons will be made against the Sony Ericsson T616. Know it. Love it.

Call Quality and Reception

I know, weird to start off a phone review with this category, especially for a phone whose company asks you “Don’t call it a phone” and “Don’t call us a phone company”. As it piggybacks on Sprint, you’ll get the same coverage as Sprint. As I write this I’m in 93306, the outskirts of Bakersfield. I have full bars on both phones (Drift on Sprint, T616 on Cingular). Call quality on the Drift seems slightly better than the T616, but this could be simply my imagination.

Google Maps

The killer app on the Drift is Google Maps. In San Francisco the device is accurate to within a few meters, though during my Thanksgiving weekend I had to opportunity to test it in Bakersfield (um, yay?) and found that it would sometimes tell me that I was several miles from where I actually was. This made me wonder - is it actually a GPS or does it triangulate based on cell tower proximity? Despite its placing me at the local raceway when I was in fact at home, I have had good experiences with this app. It helped me find the Bubble Lounge, after all.

No Mac Support

Now to bring it down a notch. Being an avid Mac user, it is important to me that a device be able to talk with my MacBook if it makes sense for it to do so, and a phone certainly falls into this category. Address Book is the master, the source, the benevolent dictator that tells me who I know. He should be able to tell my phone who I know, and to continue to update my phone with the latest news of my social goings-on. Unfortunately I can’t do this with Helio and the Drift (but where there’s a will, there’s a script - post a comment if you want instructions).

In fact, I can’t even pair the thing with my computer due to a mismatch in the number of digits expected for the PIN. I never had a problem with my T616 or my Motorola V551. What’s up with that Samsung? The included USB cable doesn’t appear to do anything when I plug it in to the Mac, so the only way I could even get files onto the thing is to get a MicroSD card reader, a card, and then hook that up to my computer. This is a big thumbs down for me.

Look and Feel

NOTE: The stickers are still on the face and back of the thing, and that’s why the display looks a little funny.

T616 + Drift, Front First things first: it is a sexy beast. The device itself feels solid, despite the occasional weirdness of it moving slightly when I’m on the phone due to the slider form-factor. It is a little smaller than my T616, though not by much. It is slightly heavier as well, but when it’s in my pocket I don’t notice the difference. Looking at the picture to the right at a bigger size, you may notice the time on the T616. This is a handy feature, as I don’t wear a watch. The Drift lacks this touch. The soft buttons are of a similar setup on the two, and I like some features of each. Both have a “back” button, but they’re in different places. The Drift’s button is a little too close to the “down” button, leading me to accidentally press it a few times. The two soft buttons on both are easy to hit, but directional buttons in general are easier on the T616 due to its joystick configuration. This is countered by its occasional confusion of pressing the joystick in being taken as some other direction, a problem the Drift does not share. The Drift goes along with convention by having two large buttons: the green and the red, logically used when beginning something (notably calls) and ending something (as well as power).

T616 + Drift Expanded, Front The number pad on the Drift is revealed by sliding the face up, revealing buttons that are large but with no margin, which in practice I find harder to hit accurately than the smaller keys on the T616. When opened, all the keys on the Drift light up, including the soft keys, which is important due to their lack of margin. The Drift is relatively smart about when to use T9 vs. Multitap, but you have to tell it to use T9 the first time. One major annoyance is typing in the web browser, as there doesn’t seem to be a way to easily type a forward slash. You have to change the input type to Symbol, press down twice, then press 7 twice. Ack.

Also, the charger seems likely to cause less damage to the phone than with my T616 (I had a previous one that eventually stopped charging because the charger had broken the contacts on the phone). The only thing that remains to be seen is whether the flap will insist on sticking out like the RAZR’s is wont to do. As for the actual feel of the Drift, the side buttons make holding it a slightly more uncomfortable experience compared to the T616.

Camera

While this isn’t that important to me, it is a nice thing to have sometimes. I hadn’t used the camera up until this test, and I must say it’s pretty darn good. Be warned though, that this is from someone who’s current camera phone was made several years ago. The picture to the left is from the Drift. It is a somewhat challenging shot because of the intensity of the background light. Yet the drift did okay with it. By contrast, the T616 fell flat on its face, as shown below. However, I had to send the picture to myself from the Drift via MMS to my email, which took a few minutes. On the T616 I just used Bluetooth file transfer, which took about 10 seconds. Two steps forward, one step back.

Drift T616
Drift Camera Test T616 Camera Test

Browser

The browser seems like a good idea, but it’s pretty restricted. I could sign into GMail, but not actually see my messages. I couldn’t install the GMail app. As mentioned earlier, typing in URLs manually is a pain. Some sites are suggested for you (like Digg, MySpace, etc), but I find browsing on them reminiscent of a squinting contest. I wouldn’t use this phone if you plan to use the web a lot. As I don’t plan to use the web a lot on it, the jury is still out as to whether this will affect my final decision.

IM

Despite the crappy browser, it is still pretty usable as an IM client. It supports AIM, MSN, and Yahoo!, though Jabber is conspicuously missing. I’ve tried it with AIM and found it usable, but not terribly useful. Who wants to be reachable all the time like that? SMS and calling is enough of a distraction.

Email

Sending just a regular ol’ email seems to be done through the browser at Helio’s webmail site. This is pretty annoying as you must navigate to the site, log in, then send a message. This is not usable, though it could be useful if it were. I already mentioned that GMail is not supported, so look elsewhere for that functionality.

Baked-in Offline Apps

Apps such as the calendar, alarms, contact list etc. feel pretty good compared to the T616 and have more options, such as a recurrent alarm that happens only on weekdays (no more setting the alarm every night!). The ability to have a summary of your Todos and Calendar on the phone’s home screen is nice, though there’s no interactivity (which is probably for the best, as the confusion introduced by that would just be too much). Unfortunately, as mentioned before, there’s no sync here with the Mac. There may be with Windows, but that doesn’t matter to me.

Battery Life

My phone usage is maybe 15 minutes a day talk-time. I also have played around with the Google Maps thing for a few minutes at a time. So far the Drift seems to last about 2-3 days with this usage. This is worse than the T616, which goes about 3-4 days with this usage. The battery indicator on the Drift is also a discrete thing with four bars, whereas the T616 is more granular (and colored too!).

User Interface

Drift Dialing The main user interface it pretty easy to get used to, but the Java apps don’t obey the same rules, nor do some of the built-in apps (like the MMS client). This is kinda weird, and stands in strong contrast to the T616 where all the built-in stuff has the same UI (of course the Java apps don’t, but there’s not much call to use them). But damn, isn’t that dialing screen nice?

Summary

The Drift is a nice sexy slider, but the jury is leaning toward canceling the Helio service, mainly because of the lack of Mac support. More on it in 10 days or so, when I’ll discuss the iPhone’s impact on my decision among other things.