Best T-Mobile Phones of the Year

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	Home / Cell phones / infoSync 2008 Awards

	Best T-Mobile Phones of the Year	By Philip Berne, 24 December 2008

What are the best options on T-Mobile, now that the 3G service has officially gone live? Are there still great phones for folks on a budget? Check out our favorite picks.

Android Smartphone: T-Mobile G1

The T-Mobile G1 was a coup for both T-Mobile and HTC, the company that built the phone. Like Apple with the iPhone, Google could pretty much rely on their brand to build hype for the first device running the Google Android phone OS. But for T-Mobile, the T-Mobile G1 practically inaugurated the country to T-Mobile's 3G service, and proved that the carrier can still snag high-profile exclusives. Best of all, the T-Mobile G1 is not only a great smartphone, it's a sign of great things to come, as even this capable phone has room for improvement all around. And with that open platform OS, we have no doubt that improvement will come.

Business Smartphone: RIM BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220

While the BlackBerry Bold and the BlackBerry Storm are the real big-ticket exclusives this year for BlackBerry fans, T-Mobile still has an interesting BlackBerry option up their sleeves in the RIM BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220. For a fraction of the price of the two larger BlackBerry devices, the Pearl Flip 8220 offers a nice entry point, and a cool alternative to the candy bar Pearl. We wish the phone had 3G networking, but we still loved the new and improved BlackBerry interface, and the handset design looks much nicer in person than photographs portray. It isn't going to blow away your fellow board members, and it won't drain your bank account, either, which fits nicely with T-Mobile's image.

Music Phone: Nokia 5310 XpressMusic

T-Mobile doesn't have the 3G network services to compete with Sprint or Verizon Wireless, so the carrier tends to release very focused single-feature phones. That isn't to say that the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic doesn't do anything other than music. Rather we mean that it's so focused on music that it's better than almost any other music playing phone on the market. It's a thin, elegant phone, and a snappy design from Nokia, who has come through in unexpected ways this year.

5-Megapixel Camera Phone: Motorola Zine ZN5

With the Motorola Zine ZN5, we see the U.S. manufacturer pair with Kodak, the U.S. camera maker to create a phone that, quite simply, takes better pictures than any other camera phone we've seen. That isn't saying much, unfortunately, so hopefully the Motorola Zine ZN5 will spark the industry to care more about image quality. Even beyond photos, the ZN5 was a satisfying phone, and it could easily replace an inexpensive point-and-shoot camera.

Messaging Phone: T-Mobile Sidekick 2008

For consumer-oriented messaging phones, there's nothing like a Sidekick. It isn't just the crazy design, with its ninja-flip screen, though on the T-Mobile Sidekick 2008, we were undeniably swayed by the custom shell design option. Even better, though, is the interface, which is totally focused on the messaging user. No other carrier has gotten this right. All the other carriers simply tack on a generalized multimedia OS to their QWERTY phones, while T-Mobile pays attention to this particular segment and designs a fun interface that makes gathering and sending messages, via text message, IM or e-mail, easy and intuitive. Hopefully, now that Microsoft has purchased Danger, the company behind the Sidekick, we'll see some of that innovation come to the Windows Mobile platform, and perhaps we'll see a more serious Sidekick in the future as well.