Huawei M750 (MetroPCS)

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Huawei M750

Huawei is a little-known cell phone manufacturer in the United States, mostly because a majority of its phones here have been basic handsets like the Huawei M328. Still, the company has gained momentum slowly in the past year: Huawei built the T-Mobile Tap last year and now it offers the M750. As one of two touch-screen handsets available from MetroPCS (the other is the Samsung Finesse), it's not the most advanced phone we've ever seen, but the M750 still has a number of features for the average user. The Huawei M750 is available for $159 without a contract.

Design
The M750 measures 4.2 inches long by 2.25 inches wide by 0.59 inch thick; it's a simple rectangular slab similar to other touch-screen phones. It has rounded corners, an all-gray color palette, a glossy front surface, and a matte finish on the back. At 3.91 ounces, the M750 feels solid in the hand.

The Huawei M750 has a 2.8-inch touch-screen display.

Dominating the front of the phone is a 2.8-inch touch-screen, which may seem a little small when you compare it with the 3-inch display on the Finesse. However, the M750 doesn't have a video player and you can't rotate the display to landscape mode, so we're fine with the smaller screen. The screen is sharp and colorful thanks to the 262,000-color support and 240x320-pixel resolution. You can adjust the backlight time, the brightness, the appearance of the clock on the home screen, and the greeting banner text. Though you can't change the menu interface, we liked the simple grid layout and the illuminated icons.

The touch screen on the M750 is responsive and intuitive to use. Still, we found it to be more accurate when we used the phone's stylus instead of our fingers. You can improve the accuracy by going through the phone's calibration wizard. Along the bottom row of the home screen are shortcuts to the phone dialer, the Web browser, the MetroPCS Web store, and the screen lock function. The phone dialer has a roomy keypad with big digits. It also has a backspace key and quick access to the contacts list and call log.

For text messages, you can either type via an alphanumeric T9-capable keypad or a full QWERTY keyboard. The M750 does not have an internal accelerometer, so the screen does not rotate to landscape mode. As a result, the keyboard feels quite crowded and the keys are tiny. We definitely felt like we needed to use the stylus here to select the keys accurately.

Beneath the display is a navigation array, which you can use in addition to the touch interface. It consists of two soft keys, a square toggle with a middle confirmation key, a Send key, and an End/Power key. The toggle also acts as shortcuts to the Contacts list, the MetroPCS Store, the Messaging menu, and the Web browser. To get to the main menu from standby, you can select the middle key or tap once on the home screen. The keys are flat to the surface with the exception of the square toggle. We didn't find that too annoying; we found ourselves using the touch screen for the most part anyway.

On the left spine are the microSD card slot, the charger jack, and a 2.5mm headset port; the volume rocker and a dedicated camera key are on the right. On the back, there's a stylus storage area on the upper left corner. The camera lens and external speaker are on the back as well.

Features
The Huawei M750 has a 1,000-entry phone book with room in each entry for four numbers, an e-mail address, a Web address, and notes. You can then add the contacts to caller groups, pair them with a photo for caller ID, and pair them with one of 10 polyphonic ringtones. You can also use your own voice recordings or MP3 files as ringtones. Other basic features include a vibrate mode, a speakerphone, text and multimedia messaging, a scheduler, an alarm clock, a world clock, a calculator, a stopwatch, and a memo pad.