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The Rumor is an able messaging device. It's not the email master we'd like it to be, but if Web mail accounts from Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL are more your speed, the Rumor suffices. It also makes short work of composing SMS and Picture Mail messages (and spreading rumors).

You can compose any sort of message with the phone closed, but that sort of negates the point of having the QWERTY keyboard. It's far easier and less time-consuming to simply pop it open instead of triple tapping (or even using T9) to put together a note.

Sliding the phone open automatically pops up the messaging menu. This lets you jump to your voicemail, or compose text, email, Picture Mail, IM and Facebook messages. Below the voicemail option is a "send messge" option. This provides a quick shortcut to the composition screen for text, email and other messages. This is a good thing. Because if you scroll down in the main messaging menu, selecting "text message" or "Email" doesn't take you to a composition screen, but the general messaging center for that type of message. You're often forced to scroll down to find the compose screen.

To me, there are just too many steps involved in some of the menus here. It can take up to 10 clicks to get to the compose SMS screen. It's just more time-consuming than I want it to be.

The first step you have to take in the composition screens is to address the message to someone. So it brings up your contacts database before it does anything else. It's a good thing that the contacts application is well integrated into the messaging apps and sorting through your contacts to find the right person is easy to do.

The email app has a better-looking GUI than the other messaging menus, and uses a more traditional web-style screen for adding addressees and subject lines. It has Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and Hotmail built in. Setting up accounts for these services is a snap. We loaded up several email accounts in just a few minutes (yes, I have too many email accounts, leave me alone).

The Yahoo email GUI, for example, offers some nice graphics to access different features, and controls. It looks great. But navigating it is maddening. The D-pad doesn't act as you expect it to, and it takes twice as many presses to get the cursor to go where you want it to go before you can interact with the application. We have to wonder why they would make it look so nice, but then make it so difficult to use.

Overall, having the QWERTY keyboard is the major component of the Rumor's messaging capabilities. Sure, all the messaging applications work, but they are not as easy as they should be and often require more steps than we have the patience for.

In fact, the fastest way to fire off messages was not through the messaging center at all, but by diving straight into your contacts. I think that says something.

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