Sharp TM150 Review

Sharp TM150 for T-MobileSharp's latest phone for the US is the TM150, a phone made exclusively for T-Mobile, and is their first megapixel phone for the US. Indeed, "mobile imaging" is where the TM150 most excels in, with a decent macro mode, possibly the best screen you can get on any GSM phone, and the ability to store files on a SD/MMC card. There's also tri-band GSM support, allowing you to roam anywhere in the world, a WAP browser, Java game support, and polyphonic ringtones to round out the package. While I did have some issues with the phone, it's a very solid handset and is possibly the best cameraphone you can get in the US at the moment.

Physical Aspects

Sharp is famous for making clamshells, and the TM150 returns to their roots after making the TM100, a slider phone for T-Mobile. The TM150 is a fairly large clamshell, in the same league as the Motorola V600, or Sony Ericsson Z600, and at times can feel a little awkward in your hands, primarily because it is more square than its competition. While nobody will call the TM150 a lightweight at 110 grams, this seems reasonable compared to most other clamshells on the market, which are between 90 and 120 grams.

The exterior of the phone is reasonably attractive, and photos don't really do it justice. It's certainly a deviation from Sharp's previous silver and chrome color scheme, but it is still mostly silver. The upper side of the phone houses the megapixel camera, with "Mega Pixel" written around the lens, in case you should forget. Next to the lens is the speaker, which is only used for polyphonic ringtones. We also have the external color LCD, which is around 1" diagonally, and uses CSTN technology. Located on the right side of the phone is a macro switch that allows you to improve the quality of close-up photos. Located on the left side is the SD/MMC card slot and handsfree port. The charging/data port is located on the bottom of the phone. Both the headphone and charging ports had rubber covers over them that I found annoyingly hard to open.

Opening up the handset, we are greeted by a huge 2.2" display, which dominates the top half of the phone. The bottom half houses the keypad which includes a D-pad with 'OK' selection in the middle, two soft-keys, answer and hangup keys, a dedicated T-Zones button to quickly access the T-Mobile WAP portal, as well as the typical number keys. The '*' key doubles as a toggle for switching between the main and external display while in camera mode, and the '#' enables silent mode when held for 2 seconds. The keypad, overall, was a bit of a mixed bag for me. The D-pad was possibly one of the best I've ever used. On the other hand, the keys, though large and well spaced, lacked travel and didn't provide enough feedback. I also found that the phone would occasionally miss a character if you typed too fast, though this seems to be caused by the phone's software rather than the keypad. Another disappointment was the lack of backlighting on the D-pad and soft-keys. While it's possible to navigate the phone in the dark with no backlighting, I would have liked it simply to make the keypad feel complete.

Multimedia

First up, we have the internal display. Like the GX-30, the TM150 features a 262K color TFT display with a huge QVGA (240x320) resolution. Sharp's phones use a special CGS TFT display which allows them to make their displays much sharper than most standard TFT units. All this results in the best mobile phone display on the market. Not only is it bright, very easy to read in the sunlight, and unbelievably sharp, but it's also the most vivid phone display I've seen. This allows Sharp to pack more information on each screen, and makes viewing megapixel images shot with the phone a pleasure.

 

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