Overall, I really, really like the phone. I'm not one of these people who have a new cell phone every 6 months, so my knowledge of other handsets is limited. But, I know what I like, and I like this phone.
I just got the phone Wednesday afternoon, and charged it completely before turning it on for the first time. Since then, I've obviously messed around with it a lot, looking at features, playing around with the widget bar, made a couple of short phone calls, and sent a few texts. I also manually inserted my entire phonebook, which is about 30-40 numbers. I also know that I've surfed the web on this thing for at least 2 1/2 hours, since a lot of that time was during my wait for my wife to get done with her PT. With all of that use in the past 36 hours or so, and I still have 2 of the 5 bars left on the battery.
Compared to my 2 year-old Pearl, reception is much better with this phone. I get more bars than I used to, and from what I can tell so far, voice quality is better. However, this could be due to a problem I had on the Pearl that isn't worth mentioning. I was also surprised that my area was covered in 3G, but after researching it, looks like it was added within the past few months. I had long ago gotten rid of the data plan for my Pearl, since it was too expensive. That's one thing I love about the Eternity, is that it's not considered a smartphone, so the at&t unlimited data plan is only $15/month. :thumbsup:
The screen is very responsive to touch, and right out of the box, it's very accurate. I tried calibrating the screen, but I ran into a weird issue where I'd tap the "+" sign, but it wouldn't move to the next one. I probably tapped the + about 15 times before I gave up and backed out. It's perfectly fine as it is, though, so I'm not worried about it right now.
I've found the onscreen keyboard fairly easy to use, and I've not had too many problems typing what I want. However, the phone doesn't recognize and auto-correct simple typing mistakes. I turned on the T9 predictive text, but it simply suggests words, it doesn't fix them. I don't know if it's supposed to or not, but it's annoying after the Pearl was really good at this. For example, I can accidentally type "rhe", and it'll suggest "the", but unless I specifically choose "the", it'll leave it at "rhe" as I move to the next word. I could be missing a setting, though, hopefully.
Overall, the phone and it's GUI is extremely quick. Screen transitions and entering into menus is all quick, there is no wait long enough for me to consider it lag. Tilting the phone into landscape mode in the browser or with the keyboard is quick.
The widgets bar on the home screen is pretty neat, but it also holds my biggest complaint about the phone. As of right now, you can't add anything to the widget bar! What an oversight. I'd love to be able to add application shortcuts to it, then be able to drag those icons to the desktop for an even quicker launch. I'd read online where someone "hacked" this in, but last I checked, this person hadn't responded when someone asked him how he did it.
Overall, I'm loving the phone. I hate the limited widget bar, and I also already miss threaded message conversations from my Pearl, but other than those two issues, I love the rest. Granted, I've not used the iPhone, only played with it in-store, but I honestly think this phone could be considered a viable alternative to the iPhone, albeit with a few less features, but you have more options as far as your rate/data plan is concerned. The html browser built into the Eternity is pretty decent, and from what I've read, not as good as Safari, but it definitely is passable.
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