In a smartphone race that's become all about the latest and greatest, the fastest and most powerful, the Android A9300 is an odd phone to review. Its specs don't say smartphone ¡ª it's big and clunky, running Android 2.2 on an 800MHz Qualcomm processor, without much storage or added software ¡ª but its price ($49.99 with a contract plus a minimum $15 / month data plan) screams it. So what is the A9300? Really, I think it's the evolution of the feature phone, an early preview of what cheap, simple phones will look like in the future thanks to Android. But successful feature phones have always had advantages Android phones don't: they last a long time, they don't crash, they're simple to use, and they're cheap. Can the A9300 add Android's strengths and compensate for its weaknesses to make the perfect feature phone? And how does this device measure up to the current smartphone crop? Read the full review to find out.
Hardware / design
When it's closed, the E60 Smartphone just looks like a standard Android phone, albeit a super thick one. It's got a 3.2-inch, 480 x 320 screen, with AT&T and Android logos above and below, along with some silver accents and the four standard Android buttons, which are physical and both look and feel like those on the Droid Charge. (These are pink, though, which is a strangely common theme on the A9300.) It has a plastic white shell, with a headphone jack and power button on top, volume controls on the left side, and a MicroUSB port on the bottom. The back is dimpled like a golf ball, with another Android logo and the camera lens. It's 15mm thick, and feels like a brick to hold, but I'll forgive that because of the QWERTY keyboard it's hiding. Less forgivable is the sheer surface area of the case, which infringes much too far onto the front of the A9300, making the screen look even smaller than it is.
Once you flip it open, the Capacitive Touch is notably more interesting-looking. (I should mention that it's oddly hard to open, though ¡ª the hinge is seriously sturdy and the case pretty slippery, which makes flipping it open with one hand pretty hard.) There's another 3.2-inch, 480 x 320 screen inside, which can be propped at two different angles; one is ideal for viewing and using the phone as its own stand, and the other is how you'll actually use the phone. There are four more physical Android buttons, and then a full QWERTY keyboard.
Display
Both of the A9300's displays are bad, but hey ¡ª compared to the one- and two-inch screens we've seen from "messaging phones" over the years, anything's an improvement. They're capacitive multi-touch displays, and though 480 x 320 is barely passable at any size they're at least small enough that it's not unusable. Text is often jaggy and hard to read, and video playback is fairly disappointing, but if you're using the A9300 for email, some web browsing and phone calls, it's manageable. The displays get pretty bright, and are relatively usable even in sunlight.
I found myself using the external screen for everything other than heavy typing, mostly because it's able to rotate. The internal screen is stuck on landscape mode, and 320 pixels isn't a lot of real estate for reading websites or emails, plus plenty of Android apps and system menus just don't rotate out of portrait mode. My standard move was to type anything longer than a URL on the keyboard, and then close the phone and use the external screen ¡ª it's a lot of back-and-forth.
Camera
In 2007, the 3.2-megapixel camera on the back of the A9300 would be about as good as you could expect. In 2011, it's pretty terrible. Even in good lighting, its shots are blurry and noisy, and in anything other than broad daylight photos are near-unusable. The A9300's photos were eerily reminiscent of the photos I got from the BlackBerry Curve 8330 I owned back in 2008, and I remember being underwhelmed by its pictures then. The camera and camera app are also insanely slow, taking two to three seconds to autofocus for every single shot (which explains some of the blur problems).
Video is, improbably, even worse. I shot a tree in broad daylight, and I think it looked terrible. I say "I think" because, since the camera shoots at 320 x 240, I couldn't really see much of anything in the shot. The microphone is quite good, though, which makes sense given how important the mic is to any phone.
Performance and battery life
Everything about using the A9300 screams "feature phone!" It's really, really slow to do a lot of things, which I'd forgive of a $49.99 phone, but not one that currently resides in the "smartphone" category of AT&T's store. Every time you launch an app, there's about a half-second pause before anything happens, and another half-second while you wait for the app to open. Once an app is open, though, switching around is pretty snappy. The keyboard would lag behind me as I typed, which is never a good sign, and there were frequently taps and swipes that just wouldn't register. It's hard to tell how much of that is the 800MHz Qualcomm processor's fault and how much is due to the ancient version of Android running on the A9300, but either way it's not good. The phone also gets quite warm whenever it's working hard ¡ª it wasn't burn-your-lap hot, but feeling my phone warm up while I played with it was a little disconcerting (though it feels good to hold to your face on a cold day, so it's not all bad).
Wrap-up
AT&T wants you to believe the A9300 is an inexpensive smartphone ¡ª if it is, it's as bad a smartphone as I've used in a long time. Requiring a data plan with this device is a huge mistake that totally dooms the A9300, because at the cost of ownership I can't possibly recommend the phone to anyone. But as a feature phone, for $49.99 with a contract, it has definite potential. It's solid for messaging, runs basic apps well, and does all the things you'd need a basic phone to do ¡ª plus a few more. When you can buy an iPhone 4 for $99, or Saumsung's own Infuse 4G for the same $49.99, the A9300 doesn't even come close. Don't buy this phone until it's called something other than a smartphone, but don't be surprised to see the low-end phones on your carrier's shelves get replaced by handsets like the A9300 in the near future.