Telstra Glide mobile phone

Retailing for just $129, Telstra's Glide prepaid mobile phone is a low-cost, entry-level device targeted at teenagers who text excessively. Unfortunately, its key features, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a small, resistive touchscreen, are both poorly implemented.

Read our reviews of other top Telstra Next G mobiles on prepaid.

The Telstra Glide mobile phone certainly won't win any design awards. It's a compact slider handset that easily fits into your hand, though it is quite thick. Manufactured by ZTE, the Telstra Glide is constructed from cheap-feeling, glossy plastic that attracts an excessive amount of fingerprints. The Glide's slider also feels loose and rattles from side to side in both the open and closed positions, the rear battery cover creaks when pressed, and the buttons below the display are flat and don't offer great tactility.

The Telstra Glide has a 2.4in resistive touchscreen. It is not as responsive as most touchscreen phones with a capacitive screen and requires a firm press to activate. To compensate Telstra includes a stylus that is housed in the top left corner of the phone. The small size of the display means it's trickier to navigate than cheap Android phones like the Huawei IDEOS U8150. The home screen in particular has small icons that don't appear designed for finger presses, while scrolling and swiping across the screen is clunky.

The key feature of the Telstra Glide is its slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but like the rest of this phone, it is poorly designed and implemented. The keys are well spaced, but each key is flat and requires a firm press, making typing an uncomfortable chore. The layout of the keyboard is also questionable; you need to use a shift key for basic symbols like comma and full stop.

The Telstra Glide mobile phone naturally comes with links to a wide range of Telstra apps and services, most of which you'll never use. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube are also included in the main menu, but these are merely links to the mobile versions of each of these sites rather than dedicated applications. Though it is useable and benefits from Telstra's excellent Next G network, the Glide's browser takes too long to load pages and the small screen makes for an overall poor mobile Web experience. The screen also makes it difficult to click on links with any sort of accuracy.

Other features of the Telstra Glide include a basic 3-megapixel camera, an MP3 and video player, an FM radio, and a microSD card slot for extra storage. Disappointingly, the Glide doesn't have a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, instead utilising a combination mini-USB headphone and charging jack.

The Telstra Glide is available in Australia through Telstra prepaid for $129.

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