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If the poor display quality on the T-Mobile Prism doesn't completely scare you off, the news gets better when it comes to voice calls. Here, the hardware does an admirable job - calls were loud and clear and only a bit on the digitized side, even on the built-in speaker, in all but the noisiest outdoor settings.
The Prism also includes T-Mobile Wi-Fi Calling, a free feature baked into the handset, which uses an available Wi-Fi connection to save voice minutes or to improve on poor coverage. Aside from connecting to an available network and enabling the feature, there's zero setup and it worked quite well in our tests.
Huawei has also built in some worthwhile noise cancellation for an otherwise unremarkable handset, with microphones at both top and bottom. All in all, the T-Mobile Prism is best suited for frequent talk and texters who require only occasional internet access.
Speaking of internet, that's something of a mixed bag here. The stock Android browser comes pre-installed, but Google Chrome is not compatible with this handset. Thankfully, other mobile browsers such as Mozilla's Firefox can be installed from Google Play instead.
We ran the included browser through the usual battery of benchmarks, where its Javascript capabilities scored a poky 21383.3ms running SunSpider 0.9.1 and ranked a mere 80 on HTML5 skills using the PeaceKeeper universal browser test - well below even those clunky browsers used on game consoles.
Otherwise, T-Mobile included the same basic Gingerbread Mail and Messaging apps, which all work exactly as you'd expect. The Dialer app is also pretty much stock, but we consider this a good thing compared to other manufacturers' customizations in this area.
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