The Highlight's biggest selling point is its full HTML Web browser, which takes advantage of the 2.5-inch touchscreen. It didn't impress me, however; though it was great at rendering mobile-optimized Web sites, it consistently failed to load at least 70 percent of the standard Web sites I visited. On lifestyle staples such as Yelp, page elements were erratic and unreadable. Here's hoping that a future firmware update will make the browser more usable, because as of this writing, the Highlight's crisp display is wasted on mobile-optimized Web sites that any full-featured phone can handle just fine.

Because the Highlight runs a proprietary operating system, it doesn't have access to an app store. It can run J2ME apps, but they can't take advantage of the touchscreen, making them feel (and look) rather crude. What's more, some of them (Gmail, most notably) simply didn't work at all. The built-in messaging client was similarly confusing: It logged me in to AIM just fine, but displayed only 9 of my online buddies even though about 30 were actually online. , which might help.

One thing I did like was the Highlight's TouchWiz home menu screen, which works kind of like the Mac OS X desktop. On the left side is a scrollable list of widgets (text messages, Web browser, RSS reader, MyFaves tab, and so on) that you can drag out to the desktop area for immediate access. It gets cramped rather quickly, so you have space for maybe four or five widgets at most, but it helps minimize the time you spend navigating the menus. It doesn't look particularly slick, especially compared with the iPhone's clean interface, but the customizability is welcome.

The touchscreen itself is incredibly quirky; about two weeks passed before I felt comfortable using its on-screen keyboard to send texts or fill out Web forms. It doesn't have any autocorrect functions, either, just T9 predictive text, which doesn't really fill in the gaps. Even after two weeks, I found that I was far more error-prone when I tried to type with both hands, so I stuck with the hunt-and-peck typing method.

While the Highlight's haptic feedback helps some, it's rather laggy and inconsistent. The Web browser, for example, won't always respond after you've touched a button or selected a text field. Also, the Highlight's accelerometer is supposed to determine when to switch from the standard alphanumeric phone keypad to the horizontal QWERTY keyboard, but sometimes it didn't notice the switch until the third or fourth take.