Messaging fans on AT&T will want to check out the $99 Quickfire, the carrier's latest entry in a sea of T-Mobile Sidekick clones aimed at mainstream phone buyers and young folks, who bristle at the thought of paying $100 a month for a smartphone data plan. These handsets bring a full QWERTY keyboards, large screen, and built-in instant messaging, e-mail, and threaded texting capability to the masses. The Quickfire isn't bad, despite some misfires with its user interface and call quality, but overall, it doesn't do much to set itself apart from the crowded pack.

A dead ringer for the blocky PDA phones circa 2005, the 4.8-ounce Quickfire measures a not-so-small 4.3 by 2.2 by 0.7 inches (HWD). It's constructed of cheap-feeling matte silver plastic with lime-green accents (an all-silver version and one with orange accents are also available). The sliding keyboard mechanism feels smooth and solid, and the raised plastic QWERTY keys mimic a 1980s Casio pocket calculator, but that's not a bad thing. The stiff key resistance could use improvement, however, and I often bumped my fingers against the bottom portion of the screen whenever striking a key in the top row.

The roomy, bright 2.8-inch touch screen sports 240-by-320-pixel resolution and can display up to 260,000 colors. I found it somewhat unresponsive, though. Frequently, I had to repeat button presses and scroll bar slides several times to get it to do what I wanted. The home screen contains four icons to bring up the menu, the dial pad, the music player (which I'll get to below), and a searchable address book. When left alone for several seconds, the handset automatically locks the screen. To unlock it, you touch a button and then touch an animated, falling "key" icon—a cute touch.

The Quickfire is a quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900-MHz) and tri-band HSDPA (850/1,900/2,100-MHz) world phone with a Bluetooth 1.2 radio, though it has no Wi-Fi capability. Voice calls sounded clear and loud, if a bit harsh, over 3G in both directions. Reception was a problem: The phone struggled to hold on to HSDPA, often dropping back to EDGE in what was, admittedly, a rural area. At times, it had no voice service. (The Samsung Epix and numerous other AT&T phones I've reviewed in the same location had no problem locking on to 3G for the duration of testing.) Calls over a paired Aliph New Jawbone Bluetooth headset sounded good. The Quickfire's built-in speakerphone isn't loud enough and sounds tinny. The 1,200-mAh battery lasted 5 hours 51 minutes on a talk-time rundown test, an excellent figure for a 3G handset.

There's an onboard Web browser, plus icons to log in to AT&T MEdia Net and CV for streaming news, weather, and entertainment videos. I couldn't test the video because I kept getting "Fail to Connect" (sic) errors on my test handset. There's no standalone video file player. The Web browser is a handy feature to have on a lower-end phone, but it needs a little work. WAP pages come up okay, but the browser takes poor advantage of the screen; almost half of which is taken up by two fixed toolbars at the top and the bottom. You can flick pages up and down with your finger, but you have to flick in the opposite direction of the way you would on an iPhone or other touch-screen phones. Scrolling was also slow and tedious, even with basic WAP pages. You can load Opera Mini, but AT&T phones always pop up an extra nag screen every time you access the Web with a third-party app, which is a major drag. One plus: The Quickfire can run more than one application at a time, so you can browse the Web while listening to music, or keep a few chats open in the background.

For e-mail, the Quickfire supports AOL, Windows Live, and Yahoo Mail accounts, but doesn't hook into Gmail. The same goes for instant messaging: AT&T left Google Talk out, but the phone works with AIM, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger accounts. My test AIM account worked fine but showed only the mobile portion of my buddy list. AT&T throws in the typical calendar, alarm clock, address book, and conference call, and call-forwarding capabilities. The phone also includes an A-GPS radio and supports AT&T's optional Navigator software for voice-enabled, turn-by-turn directions.

Music fans will find the Quickfire's media options especially confusing. On the one hand, the handset includes a built-in MP3 player, plus the ability to stream Internet radio, hook into Napster Mobile, and buy tracks over the air from AT&T Music. Its musicID app can also identify a song it hears, much like the iPhone app, Shazam. In addition, the covered microSD slot on the top of the unit supports cards up to 8GB for storing music and other media: My 8GB SanDisk microSDHC card worked fine. On the other hand, there's no standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack or even a 2.5mm jack—the connection is proprietary. AT&T also doesn't include earbuds or a headphone adapter in the box. At least the Quickfire works with stereo Bluetooth headphones: Music sounded warm and full over a paired set of Cardo S-2s. But audible fuzz in the treble on high-gain tracks like Green Day's "American Idiot" betrayed the limitations of the Bluetooth codec.

The 1.3-megapixel camera has neither autofocus nor an LED flash. While test images taken with the Quickfire had vibrant natural color both indoors and out, they were distorted and lacked sharpness. Videos, on the other hand, were reasonably smooth and offered well-balanced lighting at both 176-by-144 and 320-by-240 resolution. There was a little bit of jerkiness whenever I moved the camera quickly, however.

Since the Quickfire is on AT&T, an iPhone comparison is inevitable. In short, it's no iPhone, but it's not trying to be. It's $100 less and uses AT&T's less-expensive monthly data plans. The Samsung A767 Propel costs $20 less than the Quickfire and slides vertically instead of horizontally; it's another good, if not exceptional option, although its keyboard isn't as roomy as the Quickfire's. I'd give the nod to the Pantech Matrix C740, which features a more user-friendly dual-slider design, drops the finicky touch screen, and offers similar software to that of the Quickfire. Messaging fans who want a hardware QWERTY keyboard may also want to look at a low-end smartphone like the BlackBerry Curve 8310, the Samsung BlackJack II, or the Palm Centro, all of which cost about the same and have better Web browsing and e-mail. But they each require at least an extra $15 per month for an upgraded service plan. If the Quickfire speaks to you, and you're in a major city with a strong AT&T 3G signal, it's not a bad messaging phone—but there are plenty of more appealing options.

Compare the AT&T Quickfire with several other mobile phones side by side.

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