Huawei Pinnacle (MetroPCS)

How does unlimited talk and text for $40 per month sound? The Huawei Pinnacle will get you that, along with unlimited Web access and a terrific little keyboard for texting to your heart's content. Sure, you can only access the Web with super slow data speeds and a limited browser and the phone's media features are nearly nonexistent. But it costs just $9, and is an otherwise solid cell phone?for anyone looking to talk and text on a budget.

Design, Call Quality, and Apps
The Huawei Pinnacle measures 4.3 by 2.4 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.5 ounces. The back is made of rubberized black plastic, while the front is glossy and gray. It's super lightweight, but feels like a quality device. The 2.4-inch display features 320-by-240 pixel resolution. It's nice and sharp, and colors look particularly saturated. Below the display are some simple function keys, and below that is the excellent, BlackBerry-style four-row QWERTY keyboard. The keys are clicky, tiny little matte plastic bubbles, with enough space in between to make for smooth typing. It's a very good keyboard for email and messaging.

The Pinnacle is a tri-band 2G 1xRTT (850/1700/1900 MHz) CDMA device with no Wi-Fi. The phone is 2G only, as MetroPCS lacks a 3G data network. The carrier has 4G LTE, but only higher-end smartphones operate on it. On the plus side, unlimited, contract-free plans for the Pinnacle start at $40 (including all taxes and fees) for unlimited talk, text, and Web. $50 per month will get you all of that plus unlimited use of MetroNavigator, which offers turn-by-turn GPS directions. That makes the Pinnacle a great deal, provided you live in a MetroPCS coverage area and can put up with the slow internet speeds.

Call quality was good, with clear and pleasant voice in the phone's earpiece, though volume is a touch low. Calls made with the phone sound clear and easy to understand, though background noise cancellation is poor. The speakerphone sounds fine, but is too low to hear outdoors. Calls also sounded fine through a Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset ($129, 4 stars), but there's no voice dialing available, Bluetooth or otherwise. And battery life is on the short side, at 4 hours, 49 minutes of talk time.

Apps, Multimedia, and Conclusions
The Pinnacle benefits from a simple, if somewhat plain, user interface. The home screen has links to the main menu, apps, and widgets. The main menu is home to all of your standard features, like call logs, contacts, messages, a music player, settings, and tools. Apps pulls up icons of all your Web-based applications on the phone's home screen, and Widgets gives you quick access to a clock, calendar, music player, and weather info, all splashed on top of your home screen.

The Obigo 5.0 Web browser does a decent job with WAP sites, but it's super slow and navigation can be painful. Unlimited Web access is a great feature, but be sure to skip this phone if that's your primary concern. Email and IM clients are included for most standard accounts, and both worked fine. All of the typical apps make an appearance as well, including an alarm clock, calculator, notepad, stopwatch, and world clock.

The Pinnacle has 27MB of free internal memory. There's also an empty microSD underneath the battery cover that had no trouble with my 64GB SanDisk card. There's not much of a reason to use it, though, because media is not this phone's strong point. I was able to listen to MP3, M4A, and WAV music files, but some hiss came through on wired headphones, and sound over Altec Lansing BackBeat?Bluetooth headphones ($99.95, 3.5 stars) was rather tinny. Video playback fares even worse, with low-resolution QVGA video too choppy to watch. To make it easy, I'd just count this phone out for music and video altogether.

The 1.3-megapixel camera is poor. There's no flash or auto-focus, and photos look dark and blurry, regardless of where you take them. There's also no video recording.

If you can sacrifice pretty much all multimedia, the Huawei Pinnacle is a good choice for low-cost voice calls and text messages on MetroPCS. The LG Beacon?($39, 3.5 stars) features a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a better music player, but it's a lot bulkier than the Pinnacle. The?Samsung Freeform III?($19, 3 stars) has a similar design to the Pinnacle, though it's somewhat buggy and has even shorter battery life. If you lose the keyboard, your options expand to include some basic but capable flip phones. Or you can spring for the?BlackBerry Curve 8530?($149, 4 stars), which gets you better multimedia capabilities and a vastly improved Web browser, but requires a $60 monthly plan.

Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 4 hours 49 minutes

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