The biggest selling point of the DSTL1 phone is that it can support two separate wireless phone numbers. You simply insert two SIM cards into the two slots below the battery. There's also a slot to accommodate a with a capacity of up to 16GB. The phone itself has 4GB of internal memory.

The DSTL1 runs Android 1.5 OS (not the ) and carries a 624MHz processor inside. General Mobile went to for the 3-inch 240-by-400-pixel touchscreen display and to for the 5-megapixel camera. The DSTL1 has an FM radio on board and offers Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi support.

These specs look good on paper, but the phone's construction felt cheap. I didn't like the phone's highly reflective plastic chrome outer shell--because I would rather see the phone's features and content than my own reflection. The DSTL1 has a navigation wheel with an Enter button in the middle, plus buttons for making a call from either SIM card. General Mobile also provides an on/off button and an extremely useful back button.

Measuring 4.4 by 2.1 by 0.6 inches, the phone is nearly as thick as the , yet it lacks a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. As a result, you have to rely on the native Android touch keyboard for your typing, which is painfully small and awkward to use in portrait orientation, and far from comfortable in landscape mode.

All of this might not matter much if the touchscreen worked well, but it doesn't. The screen appears to be imbedded a few millimeters deep in the phone's clear plastic shell; in any event, the touchscreen had trouble responding immediately and accurately to my commands in connection with everything from selecting apps to customizing the desktop to using the calculator. Meanwhile, the , such as 'open calendar', seemed to work well.