Digital Trends

AT&T Tilt 8925

March 14th, 2008 | by Mike Kobrin

Giving the Tilt a Whirl

The Tilt takes an agonizingly long time to start up. We clocked just over a minute from pressing the power button until major functions became available. That's an expected trade-off for such a complicated device, but it still made us think twice before turning the unit off.

The touchscreen is surprisingly finger-friendly, but HTC thoughtfully includes two styli for larger-fingered folks. The main screen is well laid out and features a handy shortcut bar for quick access to settings for power, screen rotation, and wireless features, as well as text messaging and voice-activated dialing. Below that are shortcuts for email, calendar, IM, GPS, and Windows Media Player.

We mostly operated the phone without the stylus, except for typing on the touchscreen's tiny keyboard. The side wheel should is not very precise for scrolling through email or music files, so we wound up just using our fingers instead.

The backlit QWERTY keyboard has domed buttons, and the screen automatically rotates to landscape mode when you slide it out. The slightly textured keys have a good tactile feel, but the spacebar has a double-click that occasionally threw off our typing. Also, the two buttons at the top that control the on-screen soft keys are too close to the top row of the keyboard, so we kept accidentally pressing them. Thankfully the number keys are a distinctly different color than the rest of the keyboard making numerical entry quick and easy.

Applications

The list of software programs preloaded on the Tilt is impressive: Aside from AT&T's music, shopping, and video offerings, you get Microsoft Office Mobile (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Google Maps, Internet Explorer, Windows Live Search, and TeleNav (GPS). The IM client supports AIM, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger, while the email client handles any POP3 or IMAP accounts. Games include Ms. Pac-Man, Solitaire, Midnight Pool, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07, and several more, plus access to many more over-the-air downloads. Other entertainment options include widgets for MobiTV and MySpace.

The functions we used most often were text messaging, Word, Internet Explorer, and email, all of which worked extremely well. We especially like Windows Mobile 6's push email, alerting us to email messages as soon as they hit our inbox. Web surfing was consistently solid thanks to the relatively quick HSDPA/EDGE data speeds, though we got noticeably better performance when connected to a WiFi network. The phone's internal WiFi antenna is reasonably good at detecting wireless networks.

The 400-MHz processor didn't have any trouble maintaining normal operating speeds even when we had Word, email, Google Maps, and IE open. Microsoft's ActiveSync, which automatically syncs your phone's data and email with a PC and/or a Microsoft Exchange server, is a godsend for Outlook users, though it can slow down the phone a bit if left on.

Watching videos and listening to music in Windows Media Player and via MobiTV would've been a lot more fun if HTC had included earbuds or at least a standard headphone jack. Instead, we had to use Bluetooth headphones, which paired very easily with the phone and sounded as good as current Bluetooth technology can be expected to. The speaker on the back of the phone is quite loud, but when the phone is sitting on a desk, the speaker is obscured, bringing down the volume significantly.

Image Courtesy of AT&T