A Great Phone, A Great Big One, That Is!!!
Written: Jun 16 '03 (Updated Jun 23 '03)
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Pros: Speakerphone, high screen resolution, color, vision enhancements.
Cons: Big, bulky, "clicky" buttons, directional pad, menu system.
The Bottom Line: A pretty good phone if you're planning on using Vision capabilities, but not so great as just a phone.
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| rmskater's Full Review: Sanyo SCP-4900 |
Well now, I do have to admit that this is a very nice phone. It can handle calls and utilizes Sprint's Vision capabilities very nicely. All in all it is a great phone.
Okay, this phone IS pretty big, at least compared to Sprint's other phones. It is about 5 inches tall and about 1 and 1/2 inches wide. It is about 3/4 to an inch thick. The antennae sticks up about an extra 1/2 an inch out of the top of the phone.
The front of the phone is pretty flat. The buttons don't pop up and out of the phone's face like they do on some phones (the Nokia 3585i for example). They are flat and "rubbery".
However, the directional pad is designed in the worst way. If you drew a line connecting the left and right arrows, and then drew a line connecting the up and down arrows, it would look a little like a cross. This "cross" design is bad. It should look more like a plus sign than a cross. The reason why this design can get annoying is because when you press the up button, you might accidentally press the left or right button. Even when you try to, you might hit it. This easily gets annoying.
The reception that this phone provides is pretty good. The last phone that I had, a Samsung 8500, drove me crazy because every single one of my calls always got dropped and it really irritated me. I couldn't stand it.
However, the Vision service is starting to annoy me. I actually started with Sanyo (the maker of this phone) backwards. I started with the camera phone (the Sanyo 8100), and then gave that to my fiance. I am currently waiting for the SONY Ericsson T608 for Sprint to come out.
Well, the 8100 phone was the newest phone, so it was obviously much faster and more advanced than this one is. Well, I was used to getting connected in a few seconds, and rarely having connection difficulties. However, with this phone, sometimes when I tried to connect wirelessly to the web, it would say that the network was down. I knew this was not true, because the 8100 was surfing just fine RIGHT NEXT TO IT. I still have never been able to figure out what the problem was.
Anyways, I have some trouble with the web, but I have gotten used to most of the difficulties and problems that it throws at me. The worst thing that I have encountered is filling out documents (writing e-mail, logging on, etc.). This is because the browser on this phone is slow. There is a little bit of slow-down. Think of it as a computer that is doing some heavy duty multi-tasking. There is going to be some major slow-down, and when you click on stuff, it will take a few seconds to register. Now, there's not severe slow down here, but it's still kind of annoying.
Like most phones, this has a dedicated "Web" button that will launch the browser. This may annoy some people who aren't paying for Vision services, because for them, this button will be unnecessary. The other really annoying thing about the button layout on this phone is that the speakerphone button is snuggled right up under the keypad. I don't like this, because I have accidentally hit it when I was dialing a number. I don't like the fact that it is so close to the keypad.
The features of the phone are pretty nice. The menu is very graphically pretty, with animation for the scroll menu. However, recently, I downloaded some pictures onto the phone (which were taken with the Sanyo 8100 camera phone from Sprint).
There are two things which I very much dislike about this. First of all, the picture is enlarged. This bugs me because I can't get the whole picture onto the phone. Second of all, though the resolution on the phone is very high, it is no where high enough to look stunning. When you look at a picture on this phone, it looks washed out.
There is the usual Call History, the Phone Book, the Messaging, Voicemail Access and other options. One particular thing that I like is that on the Messaging options, the "Short Mail" option actually takes you to the SMS page on your phone. This way, you don't have to navigate online to that page manually.
There is one big problem about this phone, however, that is really getting me to dislike it. This phone has the biggest problem multitasking. Especially when you get a call. When you're doing something, if a call comes in, everything will freeze for a bit, then the call will come in. Or, if you miss a call, that's even worse. When you get missed calls, the missed calls counter will show up. However, when you access it, you will run into major slowdown. It literally takes about five to ten seconds for the phone to respond to button presses when you have missed calls. This bugs me so much.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): Unknown
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Epinions.com ID:
rmskater
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Location: Plano, Texas, USA
Reviews written: 62
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
I like skateboarding and I love my cats and my best friend, Kelly.
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