In our AT&T Quickfire review, were we taken in by this Sidekick lookalike, or did the touchscreen messaging phone let us down?
Review summary of the AT&T Quickfire:
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 The AT&T Quickfire disappoints at almost every level. The interface design is simple and bare, with some odd ways of handling touch input and gesture controls. Of course, that won't matter much, because the screen is so unresponsive that we didn't bother skipping around the interface more than we had to. The keyboard designers seemed to have desktop PCs in mind, and didn't make any concessions to help mobile users. Worst of all, the phone is Spartan when it comes to messaging options, and neither our favorite e-mail client nor our choice of IM service was supported. The Web browser was surprisingly adequate, and call quality was okay, but with abysmal battery life rounding out our list of complaints, it's easy to conclude that messaging users and touchscreen addicts alike deserve better. Release: December 2008. Price: $100.
Pros: Good Web browser.
Cons: Everything else. Unresponsive touchscreen. Poor hardware design. Simplistic, disorganized interface.
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Full AT&T Quickfire Review:
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Design - Mediocre
We could spend a thousand words detailing every little problem we had with the AT&T Quickfire's unresponsive screen and problematic interface, but let's sum it up in three: it doesn't work. The touchscreen didn't work; it usually didn't register our taps, no matter how soft or hard we pressed, and it was otherwise inaccurate. The interface was poorly organized, with some strange behaviors and decisions, and the graphics, already poorly drawn, seemed to stutter a bit. There are plenty of shortcuts built into the interface, including some shortcut icons on the standby screen, and a dedicated button below the screen to open up the Applications menu, but these menus were difficult to manage because of the unresponsive screen, and often a selection would lead to another menu, sometimes with one, or even no available items to select.
We could easily go on and on (and on), so let's simply say the touchscreen interface doesn't. Neither does the rest of the phone. We had problems with the keyboard, which we'll detail when we talk about messaging below. The phone is a chunky brick. It may closely resemble the ill-fated Motorola-made Sidekick Slide, but it lacks any of the Sidekick family's style or ease-of-use. The bland, plastic body has plenty of exposed seams, and from the side the phone looks a lot like an ocean freighter. At least the slide had a strong, confident click.
Calling - Mediocre
The sound quality of calls on our AT&T Quickfire review unit was mediocre at best. On our end, we heard plenty of background hiss, and voices sounded a bit muffled. Callers reported an overly-bright sound, with voices that were a bit more whiny and pinched than normal. Dialing with the phone was unnecessarily difficult. When we pressed the "Call" button, we were taken to recent calls. Fair enough, but there was no way to jump to the dialer from there. We had to back out to the today screen where the dialer is not the first icon, the one with the 9 buttons on it (Main Menu), but the one next to it with the old-school telephone receiver.
The address book is bare at first, but you can add a number of extra fields. Still, with no way to synchronize our Outlook contact list, typing all those numbers would be a chore. The VR button on the side opens the Voice Commands (V.C.?) menu, and without warning a couple seconds later, the phone will start listening for speaker-independent voice commands. The system wasn't nearly as intuitive as the Nuance voice dialing app we see elsewhere. The speakerphone was adequate, and the phone paired with all our Bluetooth devices without trouble.
Messaging - Mediocre
For a phone so squarely aimed at the consumer messaging market, we were amazed that the messaging apps could be so bottom-of-the-barrel. The SMS app was simple, though the interface is poorly structured. For instant messaging, the phone gets the basic AT&T app from OZ, providing support for AOL, MSN and Yahoo, and that's it. We like Gtalk, though we often use Facebook for daily simple messaging. For e-mail, you can choose from a list of 10 preset services, and if you don't use one of those, you are out of luck. We use Gmail, which wasn't on the list. Besides the full QWERTY keyboard, the AT&T Quickfire simply isn't better for messaging than any other basic feature phone on the market.
We're not thrilled with the keyboard, either. The keys themselves were okay, nicely sized with plenty of space between. Unfortunately, we had trouble seeing the letters thanks to the color combination of pink letters against an orange background. Under our office fluorescents, it was hard to see. When we could read it, the keyboard letter choices struck us as quite strange. There is no dedicated messaging key anywhere on this full-QWERTY phone. There are few symbol keys that get their own letter, though there is an inverted-T arrow key layout (with page-up/page-down keys? on this phone?). Again, we could go on, but let's just say that, in many ways, better choices could have been made on the keyboard.
Multimedia - Mediocre
The AT&T Music player on the AT&T Quickfire was very touch friendly, though navigating to it always meant menu drilling. Even the musical note icon on the standby screen only takes you to a menu. The phone had no trouble with our MP3 files, though our album artwork didn't make the cut. There's no music transfer software and no USB cable to fit the proprietary jack on this phone. We had to load files directly onto the microSD card using an adapter. In fact, AT&T doesn't even include a set of headphones, so if you aren't using Bluetooth headphones, you're probably out of luck.
Video on the AT&T Quickfire comes courtesy of AT&T's Cellular Video streaming clips, and it wasn't the worst performance we've seen. Videos were blocky, but mostly because they were being expanded to fit the phone's wide, 2.8-inch screen. The phone's fast networking meant videos would load fairly quickly, with little stuttering once playback began.
Web browsing - Good
The Web browser is, hands-down, the best feature on this phone, and that isn't saying much. The Polaris browser has gotten a nice skin for this phone, and it handled many complicated Web pages admirably. In other words, our homepage looked fine, but some competitor technology blogs didn't make it through. The browser just stopped trying. Too bad. Most pages will display the mobile version, but the browser did fine with many full HTML pages. Navigating was an odd experience.
The AT&T Quickfire doesn't scroll like every other touchscreen phone on the market. On most phones, you "grab" the page with your finger and move it in the direction you want. The Quickfire uses an inverted axis, so you're actually moving the scroll bar. If you move your finger up, you navigate upward on the page, but the visual is that the page is moving down. It's uncanny, and disquieting. We bring it up not to nitpick the browser, but because this is true for every page, menu and list on the phone. You move your finger up to move the items down. It's like PCD (formerly UTStarcom), the folks who made this phone for AT&T, didn't get the memo.
GPS navigation - Mediocre
GPS on the AT&T Quickfire comes courtesy of AT&T Navigator, and like everything else, it was a problematic experience. Navigating the app was clumsy and inconsistent, as touch didn't always seem to work on the menus. The phone had trouble getting a fix on our location, no matter our surroundings, city or suburbs. The maps loaded quickly, but responded poorly to the touch. Not much of a surprise here.
Camera - Mediocre
Again, by this point it shouldn't be shocking that the camera on our AT&T Quickfire review unit is lousy. Normally we'd go picture by picture with our analysis, but it isn't really worth it. The pictures are blurry, with little detail, but some odd artifacts of over-sharpening in the post-process. Colors were poor, and we couldn't get even a decent self-portrait shot. We'll let the photos speak for themselves:
Self-portrait
New York City mansion
Contrasting buildings
Starbucks at Astor Place
Christmas trees for sale
Free Common show
Price and availability
The AT&T Quickfire is available now from AT&T for $100 with a contract agreement.
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