The inexpensive T-Mobile Tap, designed by Huawei, is a stylish touch phone targeted toward tweens. While the Tap has a solid suite of communication and multimedia features, the slow interface and cramped touch keyboard keep it from being the ultimate messaging phone.
The compact Tap measures 4.2 by 2.2 by 0.5 inches thick and weighs a feather-light 3.7 ounces. Although the face of the phone is plastic, its backing is rubberized, and it feels very comfortable in the hand. Two hardware buttons (Talk, End) and a four-way directional pad with an "OK" key lie below the Tap's display. The right spine houses a dedicated camera key, a screen-lock key, and the volume rocker. On top are the power key and a mini-USB charging port/headphone jack. Unfortunately, the phone has no standard 3.5mm headphone jack.
A 2.8-inch 240-by-320-pixel touchscreen dominates the face of the phone. Though the screen is pretty low-res, the icons are large enough and clear enough to decipher, and text is still readable. The Tap's display is on the smaller side for a full touch phone (the average size of feature phone displays seems to be about 3 inches). While a 2.8-inch display is fine for messaging, I found it too small for playing back video and reading Web pages.
In my hands-on tests, I found that I had to press really hard on the Tap's plastic display to scroll through my contacts or flick through my images. The Tap supports haptic feedback, so when you press an icon or key and it registers with the phone, you receive a light vibrating sensation. This is a nice feature to have, since the Tap is fairly sluggish in responding to touch—particularly in keyboard mode. I noticed some lag between pressing a letter and seeing it appear on the screen. The haptic feedback gives you the feeling that something is happening when you hit a key—even if its letter takes a while to appear.
