General Mobile DSTL1
The General Mobile DSTL1 ($450, unlocked; price as of November 16, 2009) has some nice features, like dual-SIM card support, but I found that the device’s awkward design and unresponsive touchscreen dulled the sense of feature-richness and the ease of use that the Android OS can give a mobile device.
The biggest selling point of the DSTL1 phone is that it can support two separate wireless phone numbers. You simply insert two SIM cards into the two slots below the battery. There’s also a slot to accommodate a microSD storage card with a capacity of up to 16GB. The phone itself has 4GB of internal memory.
The DSTL1 runs Android 1.5 OS (not the newer Android 2.0) and carries a 624MHz processor inside. General Mobile went to Sharp Electronics for the 3-inch 240-by-400-pixel touchscreen display and to Sony for the 5-megapixel camera. The DSTL1 has an FM radio on board and offers Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi support.
Here are some highlights from the review:
* Overall pretty nice
* Resistive touchscreen works fine (compared to capacitative)
* 5MP camera is great
* Google Maps and Android Market are MIA (What the heck?!?!!??) There are some alternatives fortunately but still… WACK
* 80% of the apps worked fine, other 20% were victim of half-VGA resolution
* A few noticeable bugs
* Text input is slow
* No 3G is disappointing
* Dual SIM is awesome
* Battery life is rough
