The HTC MyTouch 3G Slide from T-Mobile USA is the Android smartphone that has seemed to fly under the radar. Released at a time when Snapdragon processors and AMOLED screens are all the rage, the mid-range specs on the Slide disguise the performance and feel of this qwerty slider. Packing its own flavor of the touted HTC Sense UI and running Android 2.1, the Slide was a phone I was itching to get my hands on and put it through the paces. Hit the jump to see my impressions of this solid, but forgotten phone.

The packaging We'll spare you the unboxing, as we've seen about as many of those as we can take :) . The packaging does deserve a little look however. You won't find the normal everyday cardboard and paper box. The Slide comes in a hard shell plastic case, reminiscent of a small jewelery box. Inside you'll find everything in its own padded compartment, where it fits nicely safe and sound. Speaking of everything, included are a microUSB cable and an AC-to-USB charging block, the various manuals and "getting started" guide, and an above-average quality headset with inline remote, earbuds and a shirt clip. A part of me thinks having this sort of packaging is a really nice touch, while the other part realizes that you'll probably just end up putting it in a drawer, not to be seen for the life of the phone. In any case, it's different. And in today's competitive market, different is good as long as it's done well -- and in this case (pun intended!) it is. The exterior hardware The Slide is mid-range in size as well. It's 4.5 inches tall, 2.4 inches wide, and 0.6 inches thick. It's relatively slim even though it packs a four-row horizontal sliding qwerty keyboard, and it feels good in the hand. With the keyboard closed, it feels very much like one of the previous generation (G2) HTC devices. The similarities end there though, as we'll see as we go through things. Up front, you have a capacitive touchscreen (3.4 inches at 320 x 480 resolution), four physical buttons -- Home, Menu, Back, and the Genius Button in place of the expected Search button (You can check out how it performs here, where we put it head to head against Vlingo), and a trackpad that also acts as an action button. Up top you have an attractive chrome earpiece, a light sensor and an LED for notifications. Slide it open, and you have the four-row keyboard, which we'll get into later. On top you have the power button and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. On the bottom, there's the standard microUSB connector and two microphone grills -- not that there's dual mics on the phone itself, but there are two openings to help things from being muffled by cases or fingers. I found the microphone preformed just fine, callers said that I sounded normal during usage. Around back you find the 5-megapixel camera, with LED flash and the speaker grill. In my opinion, the speaker on the phone is excellent, both for media and when using as a speakerphone. The internals I've been playing with a souped-up Froyo ROM on my N1 for a while, and I was sure the transition to using the Slide was going to be painful at best. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out how wrong I was. The Slide is a snappy device, both on paper during benchmarking and in real-world use. It certainly won't be breaking any land-speed records, but it's more than able and holds its own against some of the other newer offerings in the Android world. It does all this with a 600 MHz Qualcomm ARM 11 processor, and a respectable 512 MB of ROM and RAM. Very nice to see that HTC and T-Mobile didn't hold back in the memory department. The battery is a 1300 mAh Li-Ion, and I have zero complaints about battery life -- even with poor signal I was easily able to get a full day's use of e-mail, messaging and talk. Speaking of benchmarking, have a look and see how the MyTouch 3G Slide fares against it's bigger, faster cousins the HTC Evo 4G and the Nexus One.