HTC Mogul Cell Phone Review
By Mark Brezinski
Reviewed.com Editorial Staff
August 21, 2007
The Mogul is a sizeable phone; at 4.3 x 2.3 x 0.7 inches and 5.8 ounces, it's a bit of a brick. However, this size has its advantages: it has a big, clear 3.5-inch screen and a sliding QWERTY keyboard. Despite its size, it is comfortable and sits well in the hand. Our only concerns with its design are the durability of the moving parts and the exposed screen, which could easily get scratched. Priced at $299.99 with a two-year contract, the Mogul is only available through Sprint.
There are two ways to dial calls on the Mogul, and neither are very fast. The first is to use the on-screen keypad, which took us an average of 6.16 seconds. This is a very slow time; the T-Mobile Wing took 5.46 seconds, the BlackBerry 8800 took 4.35 seconds, and the iPhone took 3.96 seconds. The second is to slide out the keyboard and use the physical buttons, but that wasn't any faster. The Mogul is a much better organizer than phone; the contacts, calendar, tasks, and notepad programs are very easy to use and provide the features most users will need. The Mogul's organizational software is some of the most comprehensive we've seen.
The Mogul did fairly well on our audio tests; voices sounded clear and accurate, although sent voices (your voice talking into the phone) sounded a little bassy, and the received sound was slightly clipped; the very high frequencies weren't really there.
Multimedia on the Mogul is a bit of a mixed bag. It provides good support for playing back audio and video, the interfaces of each are easy to use, and the Mogul supports a good array of file types. Capturing media isn't the Mogul's strong suit, however. In our tests, we found the camera on the Mogul was significantly worse than other cell phones with similar low resolution cameras.
The Mogul handles messaging really well, offering simple interfaces and strong software. We liked its QWERTY keyboard, on which we were able to average almost 45 words per minute. Just about the only area we docked it was for MMS capabilities, since there inexplicably are none. The browsing software is pretty good, and very familiar. One of the Mogul's best assets for software is its extensibility, however, as it has great third-party support.
Battery life on the Mogul was less than stellar. The Mogul managed to keep a phone call going for five and a half hours. While this was 37 minutes longer than the Helio Ocean, it was much shorter than other phones, including the iPhone (7 hours and 4 minutes) and the T-Mobile Wing (14 hours and 15 minutes). Likewise, the battery lasted just shy of four and a half hours while browsing the Web, significantly shorter than what we usually see. It did manage to scoot past most phones for music playback, however, lasting 11 hours and 13 minutes.
The Mogul offers good multimedia support and amazing organizational software. It's very responsive, which would lead us to recommend it over the T-Mobile Wing’s slow key response. The BlackBerry 8800's OS is much easier to learn, but the device itself doesn't offer the Mogul's multimedia capabilities. If you don't care as much about the business software, the Helio Ocean or iPhone are better choices, as they both have better looks and multimedia software.
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