I'll start with as nice a comment as I can make about the Ti260: I don't like it. Admittedly, there is currently a fairly slim choice of GPRS-compatible handsets, so I should really be blaming Motorola rather than Orange for producing such a turkey of a handset. My overall first impression is of a cheap, tacky phone that you might expect Virgin Mobile to give you free as a pay-as-you-go handset. Given the initial target market for GPRS services (namely business users who can afford the rather inflated charges), I would have expected a more stylish offering. I'm sure some of my gripes are down to the fact that I am not familiar with Motorola phones, having always used Nokias by choice. There is, however, a reason for this choice.
My current phone is a Nokia 6210. This is a dual-band (900/1800) handset, with WAP and HSCSD support. Having had this handset for a few months now, I'm generally pretty happy with it. It is therefore obvious that I will be comparing the Ti260 to the 6210, and I'll be spending some time over the next couple of months comparing services using GPRS on the Ti260 and HSCSD on the 6210.
The Ti260 is based on the Ti250, with the addition of GPRS capability. The styling follows the lines of the whole Timeport range, but in a cheap-looking silver finish instead of the darker finish of other models. It looks small, but is in fact exactly the same length and width as the 6210, and about 4mm thicker (assuming the 6210 is fitted with the slimline Li-Ion battery it is supplied with.) It is a few grams lighter than the Nokia, though. The phone doesn't feel as sturdy as Nokia or Ericsson handsets, and I'd be a lot more worried about the effects of it being dropped or knocked around -- Nokias always seem to bounce back from the most unkind treatment; I'd rather not put the Motorola to the same test.
The battery is a rectangular Li-Ion pack, which is overall about half of the size of the Nokia batteries. This may explain the quoted talk time of 3 hours or standby time of 5 days -- not bad, but I get better than this from my 6210 even with a fairly old battery from my previous Nokia phone. The battery cover probably contributes a lot towards the 'tacky' feel of the handset -- it is a flimsy piece of plastic that, while clearly adequate for its purpose, does not have the solid feel of the back of a shaped battery. This cover creaks every time you shift your grip on the phone or press a button. The SIM card sits under the battery, and is held in snugly by a snap-in hinged cover, so there should be no risk of it coming adrift during use. This was a problem I occasionally had with my old Nokia 6150, but later models (including the 6210) have more positive mechanisms that cure this problem.
On turning the phone on, we are treated to a cutesy spinning Motorola logo. When the "Welcome to Orange" start-up screen appears, it can be seen how small the display is compared to the 6210 -- the text is rendered slightly smaller and doesn't look quite as nice. This doesn't help the WAP performance, but more on that later. The display is of the 'holographic' type now standard on the Timeport range, but is not quite as legible as the Nokia displays, although it looks less prone to damage since it is recessed a little with an air gap between it and the window in the front panel. The backlight is adequate but not very bright, and the lighting behind the keypad is very uneven -- in fact it looks like one of the LEDs may not be working, since the Voicemail button is almost invisible in the dark.
The numeric portion of the keypad feels positive, and all the buttons are made out of silver-coloured rubber. While this feels quite pleasant for the smaller numeric keys, the three buttons under the display feel very strange, because they protrude ludicrously from the plastic display bezel. This also makes the up/down keys rather tricky to use, since they do not protrude as much, and are a bit cramped between the Menu button above and the Voicemail and Quick Menu buttons on either side. The most annoying aspect of the keypad is the tone emitted when you press a key. This is not the refined single "meep" of the Nokias, but a rasping beep that sounds as long as you hold the key down. I found I had to disable keypad tones almost as soon as I'd started using the phone, for my own sanity as well as that of everyone around me. This is probably good for battery life as well, since even with the keylock active, the buttons still beep as long as they are held down! Since the Menu button sticks out so far, the phone could sit in your bag beeping like a deranged Game+Watch until the battery dies. The 6210 also has a key that can be left pushed rather too easily, in this case the up button. It doesn't beep though, as long as the keys are locked.
The menu structure seems slightly less well thought out than Nokia's, although it might just need getting used to. One major dilemma I have is the phonebook capability, which is the same flat list as we have all been used to for years, as provided by the SIM itself. I had got used to the 6210's ability to store multiple numbers for one name (Office, Mobile, Home etc.) as well as its support for long names. Instead of cryptic entries such as "George H (m)", I can label the entry "George Humphris", and have numbers for Home and Mobile stored under the same name. Of course this only works if I use the phone's memory, rather than the SIM to store numbers. Now I have to somehow get all these numbers reformatted so the names don't exceed 12 characters, including the "(m)" or "(h)" to indicate which number this is. (This is all made a little trickier due to the fact that the Nokia PC Suite software doesn't output useful files that I can reformat; it only syncs with evil packages like Outlook.)
The Phone.com WAP browser seems to forget that it is operating on a graphical display, and formats everything in a fixed font, allowing 4 lines of 16 characters on the screen at a time. This makes the display unnecessarily cramped, especially since each link is surrounded by < and > characters, which take up more valuable screen area. Surely a proportional font wouldn't be too hard now, would it? Now I don't have much nice to say about Nokia's WAP browser (for instance, in the Bookmarks list, "Go To" is not the first option in the Options menu, and the "pickup" button does not work as it does for following links. So once you have a bookmark highlighted, it takes another three clicks to actually go to the site.) It does, however, make much better use of the screen area simply by using a proportional font, and remember also that the screen is larger to start with.
Apart from the time saved for initial connection, since GPRS is 'always-on', browsing speeds seem much the same as before, so in use GPRS does not 'feel' radically different. The real advantage is that you do not have to think "Oh, this is costing me by the second, so I must read as quickly as possible", since you are only paying for the data downloaded and you can read the page at your leisure without running up the bill.
All in all, I may have to force myself to use the Ti260, even though the 6210 definitely remains my phone of choice. It remains to be seen whether the GPRS service makes it worth the extra grief of dealing with an unfamiliar handset. If only Nokia would get a move on and start shipping GPRS phones, I could be back on familiar ground. However, since they have yet to produce a tri-band handset, I'm not holding my breath.