Boost Mobile has the cheapest truly national plan for unlimited talk and texting; their $50/month plan gives you phone calls, messaging, Nextel walkie-talkie and really slow Internet access. If you’re willing to give up daytime talking, Web browsing and walkie-talkie, your rate goes down to $30. But up until now they haven’t had a good affordable texting phone with a keyboard.
That will change when the Motorola Clutch i465 goes on sale next month. I got to spend some time with the i465, and I’m impressed with its design. It’s a medium-sized candy-bar phone with a full keyboard of extremely pointy, almost diamond-shaped keys. The keys’ sharp ridges are designed to help your fingers tell the letters apart. They work well, but it takes a few minutes to get used to the unfamiliar pointy shapes. After that, you’re flying.
The i465 runs the traditional Nextel operating system, which is looking pretty hoary by now. Motorola tries to jazz things up with three quick-action buttons to the right of the screen, which start a new text message, jump to the (slow) WAP browser and start up the (low-res, VGA) camera. I’m pretty sure that as a Boost phone, the i465 also has a very loud, relatively clear speaker – though we’ll have to test that, of course.
Yeah, sure, the i465 looks a little odd. All Nextel/Boost phones look a little odd. But I think it’ll hit the spot for texters interested in that $50 unlimited plan. The i465 is going on sale in June for $129.99. There’s another shot of the i465’s unusual keyboard after the jump.
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