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Review AT&T Quickfire Review of Reviews

By Glibert Shar 12/01/2008

Wireless and Mobile News Rates the AT&T Quickfire 4 out 5

AT&TQuickfire is “tween” phone. It has some high-end features but it is not a full smartphone. Therefore although reviewers liked it, they found it useful to tween-users especially the young texting crowd.

The AT&T Quickfire has both a touchscreen and a a slide-out keyboard. It is built for texting, IM, email and other textual uses. The touchscreen is capacitive like the iPhone and can be used in conjunction with the the roomy keyboard. The call quality was very good and camera works fine.

The AT&T Quickfire has a good full HTML browser with fast 3G speeds for data, music and video. Reviewers liked the speed and the music, but found it strange that AT&T Quickfire doesn’t come with ear buds. It does however offer stero Bluetooth for music listening. AT&Tsells it for $99 with a rebate and contract, while the AT&T QuickFire is free at Wirefly for new AT&T customers. It is a good value for texters who don’t need super iPhone web browsing.

Nicole Lee at CNET rated the AT&T Quickfire 4 out 5 and called it “one of the better messaging phones out there. She liked the fact that it has QWERTY keyboard, multimedia, HSDPA, stereo Bluetooht, A-GPS and full HTML Polaris browser. She found that the touchscreen to be finicky even though it is capacitive like the iPhone. It looks like a T-Mobile Sidekick because the keyboard slides open. The240 x 320 touchscreen is sharp and beautiful. It doesn’t have an accelerometer, so the screen only goes to landscape when the keyboard is pulled. The browser lags. The 1.3 megapixel camera was average. Call quality was impressive, audio was decent, and speakerphone was tinny. It was quick for downloading music.

Doug Aamoth at Crunch Gear calls the AT&T Quickfire, an alternative to the Sidekick but wanders why it doesn’t earbuds to connect to the proprietary connector. He notes that it excels in the messaing and the phone calls are clear. He calls the browser, camera and battery life average. He found that the touchscreen had “issure and felt weird. The browser was slow. He concludes that if you don’t mind searching for the right headphones and are a young texter, it may be an affordable phone for you.

Chris Davies at Slash Gear wrote that the touchscreen of the AT&T Quickfire was responsive and made IM easier because of keyboard and screen use at the same time. The messaging client supports POP3 and webmail accounts, as well as the usual SMS and MMS, plus there’s a separate IM app. The browser does a reasonable job.

Quickfire specs: