Let me say from the outset that what has moved me to write this review is not so much a dissatisfaction with Sprint's cellular phone service per se, but rather with their blatant misrepresentation of the capabilities of their Voice Command service. A little background... I had been using AT&T’s one rate service for the past few years and was generally very happy with it. Sadly my Nokia phone had been beaten up so badly from daily use that it was time for a replacement. I went to a nearby Office Depot to buy a new phone with the intention of sticking with AT&T’s cellular service. To my surprise Office Depot no longer sold AT&T’s service or cell phones but instead now features Sprint and Nextel. I started to read the Sprint literature (I had time to kill) and became intrigued with one feature in particular, Voice Command. Conceptually this is a great idea. It would allow you to export your Outlook address book up to your own personal Sprint "Home Page" that would host the information. Once that is done you would, it SAID, be able to call anybody in your address book simply by saying "CALL JOHN DOE". This feature made switching to Sprint well worth it because I would no longer have to reprogram my cell phone with numbers every time I get a new one, instead, as long as I stuck with Sprint, the information would be stored on their system and be made accessible to me by "Voice Command". Pretty cool, right? Well, if it worked it would be. Instead I endured a week of frustration. I uploaded my contacts to my personal Sprint home page and was ready to make my first call. I hit the appropriate key, which basically connects me with Sprint’s Voice Command computer, and said the magic words, "Call Mike". There's a brief pause as I wait for Voice Command to work it's magic... "Call Traffic?" it asks me to confirm. "No", I answer somewhat amused. I repeat "Call Mike".... "Call Movies?", it guesses... "NO!, Call Mike!" I repeat... "I'm sorry, I can't understand"... or words to that effect. Now I'm not amused, I'm aggravated. I tried calling a number of other names and was N-E-V-E-R able to successfully have it dial a number. Now I understand voice recognition is tough, I write software for a living, but I'm not the one who claimed to have this amazing "Voice Command" service, Sprint did. But even I would expect it to get it right once in a while, if only by chance. It never did. (So here's my fantasy... the CEO of Sprint is locked in a room with no food or water and I tell him the only way he can get help is via a Sprint cell phone using the Voice Command to dial for help. Ha! He'd die of starvation.) I was so appalled at how badly the Voice Command service worked that eventually I called Sprint to see what I was doing wrong. After a few minutes with their customer support it was determined that I wasn't doing anything wrong, Voice Command just sucks. The Sprint representative admitted to me that he had given up on using it long ago.

There were two ironies about all of this. First, for some reason Voice Command is nearly flawless at recognizing numbers, so if you say "CALL 555-1212" it will dial it perfectly. That would be great if I had everyone's phone number memorized, but I don't, so it's useless. The second irony was that the phone I had purchased for use with Sprint, a nice and compact Samsung unit, had voice recognition "on board" for up to twenty phone numbers. That voice recognition worked really well, but it was only 20 numbers and it's not all that practical because the way it is set up you can not easily tell who you have programmed in. (Unless you recognize everyone's phone number.) In any case the cellular service was, in my experience, inferior to AT&T's and coupled with my other disappointments with the service I decided to turn it all back in and visit my local AT&T shop. The only "nice" thing I can say about the Sprint service is that the internet web access worked better than I expected, but the Ericsson phone I ultimately bought from AT&T has the same features and AT&T One Rate doesn't charge for internet web access, just phone calls. (With AT&T you do pay an additional monthly fee in order to get e-mail.)

The bottom line is I think what Sprint is doing is false advertising, pure and simple. I guess I am so disappointed because if it worked anywhere close to what they represented then it would be a great service. But it DOESN'T and it ISN'T.

If you have thoughts of buying Sprint in order to take advantage of Voice Command, I can't discourage you enough. Don't do it.


Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 265.00