Samsung's Texting Trio for T-Mobile
The Gravity T (for touch) is one notch above the Gravity 3.
The Gravity T is a cute little size. It's not tiny, but it is smaller than the Gravity 3, and smaller than many similar touch phones with sliding keyboards. The build quality feels good. Like the Gravity 3, you won't forget this phone is all-plastic, but it doesn't feel like it'll fall apart, either. The slide mechanism seems excellent.
The keyboard is mostly similar to the Gravity 3, except the keys are flat, not dome-shaped. The keys do have a different texture than the surrounding plastic, which helps. We had no trouble typing with it, but the dome-shaped keys on the Gravity 3 were easier to use with confidence, without staring at the keyboard to keep your fingers on target. There are dedicated period, comma, question mark, .com, and emoticon keys, plus dedicated arrow keys.
The display is quite good; both larger and better-quality than the Gravity 3's screen.
The main feature is a touch screen, naturally. It's a resistive type touch panel. It's perhaps slightly above average as resistive panels go, so it works well most of the time, but it's not the best we've tried; it does miss presses on occasion.
Taking full advantage of the touch screen is a version of Samsung's TouchWiz interface. That makes the whole interface very different than the Gravity 3 or Smiley. (This isn't just a Gravity 3 with a touch screen slapped on it.) Of course there's the standard TouchWiz widgets, which are fun, but not nearly as useful as Android widgets. You can customize three separate home screens full of said widgets and swipe left or right to switch among them.
Better yet, the main menu is fully customizable. You can arrange three screens of menu options and shortcuts however you like.
The Gravity T sports Samsung's Dolphin browser, which is based on the same WebKit engine as the Android and iPhone browsers. The browser does render pages accurately enough, worlds better than the NetFront browser on the Gravity 3 and Smiley. Unfortunately, the anemic 184 MHz processor just isn't up to the task, making the browser aggravatingly slow to use. If you need to browse the (full) web, the Gravity T is certainly a better choice than the Gravity 3 or Smiley, but if you'll use it more than once in a blue moon, we'd strongly recommend a real smartphone with a real browser and a real processor to power it.
Like most Samsungs, the camera interface is excellent, and the touch screen version employed here is simply great.
We were very disappointed to find no standard audio jack. A phone of this class should really have a 3.5mm jack for headphones.
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