I have only been with Sprint PCS for a year and half but once I saw the new color phones I had to get one. My contract was already up so I got it for $49 with a new 1-year contract, I’m partial to the candy bar style phones anyway so I was happy. The salesman handed it to me and told me not to use the Internet for at least 24 hours or I would risk messing it up.

The first thing you will notice is the bright color screen, take note though it’s only a 4,000 color screen so your photos will be dithered and may look a little funky. The main menu is very cool with the scrolling buttons, unfortunately the sub-menus aren’t as cool but still easily navigated. There are several included ringers but only one or two actually sound like a phone. The ringer quality is quite impressive, it doesn’t sound like those first generation ‘downlaodable ringer’ phones but more like computer midi files.

Of course the phone also features a phone book, calendar, calculator, and world clock. The built-in speakerphone is a nice feature and ‘airplane mode’ will allow you to turn off the phone so you can still play games on a long flight.

The buttons on the side of the phone allow you to control ringer volume from highest to vibrate or even off when you’re not on a call and speaker volume when on a call. The voice services button is immediately below those and is also easy to use. There is a small blue button at the bottom of the keypad which allows you to switch to speakerphone when on a call.

SprintPCS has really touted their new vision service as the best thing to happen to mobile phones and this phone is tightly integrated with the web. From the main menu you can scroll to the web button and get on the internet. The phone will advise you that charges will be incurred, however right now most plans include unlimited vision service for $10/month. Click ‘ok’ past that and you’re at the ‘Vision Home’ page, blue hyperlinks and all. You can navigate to several websites from CNN to the Weather Channel complete with little color images.

This is when you realize you can’t navigate to just any website on the net and the services offered by Vision are at this point fairly limited. You can download games and ringers but Sprint wants to charge you for them. There are several sites that offer free downloads (http://midlet.org/wap - choose ‘generic’) though. At first glance you’re wondering where all that bandwidth for Vision is, when you download a game over 20k you’ll see it actually downloads quickly but page-to-page navigation still seemed a little laggy to me.

After you download a game/application you can return to the main menu and select ‘Downlaods’ and then the appropriate category. Then select the program and choose ‘run’ the phone uses J2ME (Mobile Edition of the JAVA language) and it takes from 5 seconds to about a minute to load some games/applications.

The phone has about 600k of user-accessible storage space which is more than it sounds, most games are 10-30k. But if you start uploading tons of pictures for photo-ringers you’ll eat that memory up in no time.

The phone itself gets good reception, even better than my Touchpoint 2100. It gives you the ability to analog roam in case your stuck in an analog only area (of course roaming charges will apply). I did find the earpiece speaker (not speakerphone) leaves a little to be desired but it’s not junk.

I haven’t done an exact measure on battery life but it seems to be good and the Lithium Ion battery charges pretty quickly.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 50