What is the best type/touch-and-type phone in the market as of Dec 2012?

[Enchantress]

It's Christmas time and my father and I decided to gift my mother a beautiful new smartphone. Since my mother basically uses her phone for calling, messaging and music (a lot of music)...and maybe even a little bit of photography (though not a lot), we were looking for a mobile phone that excels in these areas. Another very important requirement is that the phone must have a QWERTY keypad - for my mother does not like touch phones. However, a touch AND type phone is acceptable.

Our current contestants include BlackBerry, Samsung, Nokia and HTC. However, my father has an HTC phone that discharges in a matter of two days. So, we were a little unsure about it. iPhone is out of the contest because it doesn't produce phones with keyboards - to my knowledge.

As for costs, I don't really have a specific range. But it better be below the cost of an iPhone (which is about a 1000 USD here in the Philippines). I would say between USD 240 to 600. But it's not set in stone - the quality and the features of the phone are more important and the range can be extended if necessary.

[Niko Belic]

Samsung Galaxy Y Pro
Samsung Galaxy Chat
Samsung Galaxy Pro

[COLORADO]

The best: Samsung Captivate Glide It's a lot like the popular Samsung Galaxy S II (4.5 stars, $199.99), with the addition of a full, slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a slight bump down in specs. It's our Editors' Choice for keyboarded smartphones on AT&T.

Physical Features, Phone Calls, and Internet
The Captivate Glide measures 4.9 by 2.5 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.2 ounces. Made out of lightly textured black plastic, the Glide looks unassuming, but feels well built and comfortable in your hand.

View all 6 photos in gallery

The 4-inch, 800-by-480-pixel Super AMOLED display is gorgeous. It has fewer subpixels than the Super AMOLED Plus display on the Galaxy S II, but it still looks excellent. The screen can get very bright, but darker colors maintain a luxurious depth and richness. Four haptic feedback-enabled functions keys sit beneath the display, which are suitably responsive. Typing on the on-screen QWERTY was fine, but I suspect most people are looking to the Glide for the real thing. The phone slides open to reveal a large, four-row physical keyboard. The keys are large and backlit, with comfortable, even spacing. They're a bit flat, but it shouldn't take long to adjust to typing on them.

The Glide is a good voice phone. Reception is average, and calls sound rich, clear, and natural in the phone's earpiece. The speakerphone also sounds good but volume doesn't go loud enough to use outdoors. Calls made with the phone are clear, though voices can sound thin and background noise cancellation is just average. I had no trouble connecting to a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129.99, 4.5 stars) and calls sounded great. Thankfully, voice dialing works better here, using Android's native voice-dialing app, than it does on the Galaxy S II, which uses a version of Vlingo that had difficulty recognizing names.

The Glide is a world phone that uses AT&T's HSPA+ 21 network and 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi. It also works as a Wi-Fi hotspot with the right service plan. Download speeds averaged 4Mbps down, with peak speeds of 8Mbps, while uploads were around 1Mbps up. Those numbers are good, but they're no match for AT&T's blazing 4G LTE speeds on devices like the Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket ($249.99, 4.5 stars). This isn't too big a deal, though, because AT&T only has LTE in 14 cities right now. Battery life was excellent, at 10 hours 3 minutes of continuous talk time.

Processor and Apps
The Captivate Glide is powered by Nvidia's 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 processor. It scored well in our benchmark tests, easily overpowering single-core devices, though not quite at the top of the dual-core heap.

The phone runs Android 2.3.5 "Gingerbread" with Samsung's TouchWiz extensions. There are some useful add-on apps, including Media Hub, a downloadable music and video store with reasonable prices, and Social Hub, a combination Facebook/Twitter client. There's also some bloatware from AT&T, including FamilyMap and the U-Verse Live TV app, which are both deletable. Other apps, like AT&T Navigator and an AT&T 'Featured Apps' store, are not. The Glide should be compatible with most everything in the Android Market, which currently has over 1250,000 apps.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2396819,00.asp

Good weekend