AT&T Tilt Cell Phone Review - Messaging
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Mark Brezinski Published on October 25, 2007 Comment on this |
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Supported E-mail Services (8.0)
The Tilt supports POP3 and IMAP4 e-mail accounts. It will also automatically configure settings for a few popular e-mail services, such as AOL, Yahoo!, Gmail, and Hotmail.
Push E-mail (8.0)
The Tilt supports several different types of push e-mail clients: BlackBerry Connect, XPress, and Exchange. BlackBerry Connect grants your Windows Mobile phone the push e-mail power all BlackBerry devices are equipped with. XPress is AT&T's proprietary push e-mail client, but we personally prefer the way BlackBerry handles it. The last is Exchange, which requires a dedicated server that Microsoft will be happy to sell you.
Multiple E-mail Accounts (10.0)
The Tilt can handle at least five e-mail accounts, which should be enough for even the most prolific e-mailers.
HTML and Attachments (12.0)
Windows Mobile 6 contains the ability to view HTML-encoded e-mail, something previous iterations of the OS were unable to do. There are just a handful of phones that support this, so Windows Mobile finds itself in an elite pack.
As for e-mail attachments, the Tilt was able to view our test Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files. It was also able to handle ZIP files, thanks to the built-in ZIP manager. This excellent advanced e-mail support puts the Tilt and other Windows Mobile 6 phones at the front of the pack for users who want to be able to view and edit documents on the road.
E-mail Customizations (2.0)
Windows Mobile devices don't offer much in the way of e-mail customization. The only option it gives you is the ability to add a signature to your outgoing messages.
Time to a New Message (3.1)
The reason we perform timing tests is to exemplify the complexity of a given action. Time is usually a good indicator of how convoluted it is to, for example, get a new e-mail message to appear when the phone starts in an unlocked standby. We perform several timing trials and average our results.
You can expect to have a new e-mail dialogue pop up in about 6.45 seconds, which is fairly slow. You actually have to navigate a few menus here, which is not a strong suit of the lag-prone Windows Mobile operating system. Even with a dedicated shortcut key to the e-mail messaging client, the Tilt still manages to be slow.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| AT&T Tilt | 6.45 | 3.1 |
| Nokia E90 | 3.43 | 5.83 |
| BlackBerry Curve 8320 | 1.70 | 11.76 |
| HTC Mogul | 6.22 | 3.22 |
| Palm Treo 750 | 2.23 | 8.97 |
| Apple iPhone | 1.90 | 10.53 |
E-mail Usability (11.0)
Supported IM Services (0.0)
MMS Support (7.0)
The Tilt supports MMS well, but you unfortunately must choose SMS or MMS before you begin writing a message. SMS and MMS do share inboxes, though. You can send an MMS from the photo album or from the camera application, as well as creating one from scratch via the messaging application. We would've liked to see MMS and SMS totally integrated, especially since AT&T has done this with a few recent phones, including their iteration of the Razr2.
SMS Smiley Face Interpretation (0.0)
The Tilt doesn't support smiley faces, and your colon-parenthesis combinations will remain in ASCII form.
SMS/MMS Ease of Use (7.0)
Time to a New SMS Message (12.66)
The Tilt has one of the most easily-accessible messaging programs we've reviewed. All you have to do is tap the icon on the home screen that shows a phone with a letter in front of it. There's no navigation necessary; just tap that icon and wait for the application to load. As such, the only thing we were really timing was the time it took for the phone to boot up the application, which was about 0.79 seconds. We really can't think of a way for a new SMS being easier to open than this.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| AT&T Tilt | 0.79 | 12.66 |
| Nokia E90 | 1.99 | 5.03 |
| BlackBerry Curve 8320 | 4.22 | 2.37 |
| HTC Mogul | 5.46 | 1.83 |
| Palm Treo 750 | 2.36 | 4.24 |
| Apple iPhone | 2.62 | 3.82 |
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