Huawei M735

• 
• Pros
  Good battery life. Free voice navigation.
• Cons Poor voice quality. Awful on-screen QWERTY keyboard. Sluggish. Weak speakerphone. No voice dialing. Disappointing camera and music players. Dated, unattractive UI uses too many dialog boxes. Requires a stylus for some tasks.
  
• Bottom Line
  There's no reason to purchase the Huawei M735, since MetroPCS has plenty of capable phones in its lineup.
  
  
  The $99 Huawei M735 is a textbook example of a cell phone gone wrong. It looks okay, and it has a decent array of features, on paper, that is. But it's almost impossible to type on, which renders it useless for texting, e-mail, or IM. Combine that with the M735's stubborn user interface and poor voice quality, and you end up with a bad cell choice for MetroPCS customers.
  Design, Screen, and Call Quality
  The svelte Huawei M735 measures 4.1 by 2.2 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.7 ounces. The textured matte plastic feels fine, if a bit flimsy. At least the handset is slender enough to fit into a pants pocket. It comes in bright white, which is probably its most distinctive feature. Hey, if Huawei can build a white phone, why can't Apple? (Yeah, yeah, it's about the glass; we know.)
  The 2.8-inch, plastic resistive touch screen offers 240-by-320-pixel resolution, which is standard for budget feature phones these days. The M735's panel was too dim, though, and had poor contrast and readability off center. It was also stubborn and unresponsive. Most everything I tried required several fairly strong presses before each one registered. That said, I found I could dial numbers as long as I took my time and pressed each number key stiffly. The M735 actually comes with a short stylus, which is housed in the bottom part of the phone, but using it didn't improve matters. Recalibrating the screen didn't help, either.
  All of this is nothing compared to the on-screen QWERTY keyboard, which is easily the worst one I've tried in recent memory. For some reason, the M735 defaults to an ugly T9-style keypad each time you want to type something. Worse, there's no accelerometer, either; you have to manually expand the landscape keyboard every time. None of this matters, because the landscape keyboard is overly cramped and horribly inaccurate. Don't buy this phone if you like texting.
  

  Specifications

  Service Provider

  MetroPCS

  Screen Size

  2.8 inches

  Screen Details

  240-by-320-pixel, 262K color plastic resistive touch screen

  Camera

  Yes

  Network

  CDMA

  Bands

  850, 1900, 1700

  High-Speed Data

  1xRTT

  More
  The Huawei M735 is a tri-band 2G 1xRTT (850/1700/1900 MHz) CDMA device with no Wi-Fi. You can safely ignore the "Qualcomm 3G CDMA" sticker on the back of the phone, because MetroPCS doesn't have a 3G data network. Voice quality was poor; callers sounded muffled and computery in my ear, and callers on the other end complained of the same problem. There was some background hiss and static, and I also heard many dropouts. Part of that is thanks to the area I live in, with less-than-perfect MetroPCS coverage, but other MetroPCS phones I've tested in the same location weren't nearly this bad.
  Calls sounded fine through an Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99, 4 stars) Bluetooth headset, though it took three tries to pair and wouldn't always hold a connection. There was no voice dialing of any kind. The speakerphone was so quiet at maximum volume that I thought I hadn't turned it on; it's pretty much useless. Ringtones were also tough to hear even with the volume cranked. Battery life was good at 6 hours and 21 minutes of talk time.
  User Interface and Apps
  The home screen features five panels you can swipe between, plus a slide-out toolbar on the right. Everything is laid out clearly, although it's unnecessarily homely. The main menu consists of 18 icons in a grid pattern; at least it's easy to scroll up and down here. The Opera Mobile (not Mini) Web browser took forever to render WAP pages; it's a good browser, but not on the M735. Oddly, Opera Mobile's on-screen keyboard was different; it was a QWERTY arrangement locked to portrait mode, which made it impossible to key in URLs without the stylus. (Is Huawei trying to make things difficult?) The browser home page includes shortcuts to Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, but there are no built-in social networking apps.
  The IM app took forever to install; it works with AIM, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger, but not Google Talk. Ignore Metro's App store, as it's very difficult to use and doesn't have much to offer. One bright spot: the Networks-In-Motion-powered MetroNavigator offers free, turn-by-turn, voice-enabled GPS directions with the appropriate plan. It took a while to lock onto my location but delivered clearly spoken directions and visuals, though it should have gone louder.Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
  You get 68MB of free internal memory. The microSD card slot is buried underneath the battery cover; my 32GB SanDisk card worked fine. There's a standard-size 3.5-mm headphone jack on top of the phone and music sounded fine over a wired headset. But it sounded tinny and harsh over Motorola S9-HD ($129, 3.5 stars) Bluetooth headphones. The music app displayed album art, but was difficult to navigate, and required extra button presses to choose individual songs and activate stereo Bluetooth. Selecting tracks to play was especially difficult; the touch screen preferred scrolling to making selections, so it usually took several frustrating tries to cue up a song.
  The 3-megapixel camera has no flash or auto-focus. Test photos were nicely detailed, but had a sickly yellowish cast and soft focus. One image even came out warped, as if it was taken in a fun house mirror room. There's no video player or recorder.
  All told, there's little reason to waste time with the M735 with so many other good phones to choose from. Our current Editors' Choice for feature phones on MetroPCS is the LG Banter Touch ($149, 3.5 stars), which sounds much better on voice calls, has a roomy slide-out QWERTY hardware keyboard, and is a solid music player. If you want to save money instead of spending more, the LG Imprint ($49, 3.5 stars) is almost as good as the Banter Touch, and offers a similar design. On the smartphone side, the Huawei Ascend ($129, 2.5 stars) costs about $10 more per month, depending on the plan you select. But it's a real Android smartphone that runs over 200,000 third-party applications, as well as a better music and video player; it's not our favorite Android phone by any means, but it does give you a lot of power for not a lot of cash.
  As with all MetroPCS phones, the Huawei M735 doesn't require a contract. Better yet, unlimited plans range from just $40 to $50 per month, with all taxes and fees included. This is a great deal, but you can get it with any MetroPCS feature phone, so why bother with this one?