Sanyo SCP-8400: Much more than just a cell phone
Written: Jul 21 '07 (Updated Jul 21 '07)
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Pros: Good call quality, nice features
Cons: Sprint PCS, issues with photos from PC (minor problems)
The Bottom Line: Call quality is excellent, reception is good and the features are great.
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| Gr8ful's Full Review: Sanyo SCP-8400 Cell Phone |
A few months ago my old cell phone, a Nokia 3588i, started to come apart at the seams, literally. I guess I had dropped it one too many times. It still worked but I had to hold the plastic housing together when making a call. My wife’s phone, a Sanyo SCP-4700, was a dinosaur at almost eight years old. She wanted a phone with a decent camera built-in and I wanted one with an MP3 player. We both decided on this Sanyo SCP-8400 which covered both of our wants and needs.
Sanyo SCP-8400 Cell Phone
The phone comes in three colors; blue, black and white. The only color available at the Sprint store where we bought ours was white. We are using the phones on the Sprint PCS network and I do not know if the phone can be used on any other network but if I had to guess I would say probably not.
The phone is designed as a flip-phone and opens like a Star Trek communicator. Once opened you are greeted with a high resolution LCD screen with brilliant color and great contrast for easily seeing the display in bright sunlight.
The menu is rather complicated at first but making a phone call is very easy. The advanced features of the phone are not as easy to figure out but after reading the owners manual (257 pages not including warranty and index) I was able to use all the advanced features rather adeptly.
The phone comes with a 64MB MicroSD card and an SD adapter to use with a computer. It also comes with a USB cable to connect the phone to a computer. With the USB connection you can connect the phone as a modem, connect it as a removable drive or connect it for synchronizing your contact list from Outlook. Windows XP and Vista both automatically load drivers for any of these tasks and no software is needed.
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Features
Contacts
The phone stores contact information and can be synched with Outlook on a PC. I am not sure what the limit is for contacts but I have my entire business contact list on my phone which is over 300 contacts. You can also assign each contact to a group if you like. Groups are numbered by default but can be renamed. For example; my wife and my mother are in my “Family” group. The phone stores contacts with the following information.
* First and last name (listed by alphanumerical according to first name)
* Home Phone
* Business Phone
* Cell Phone
* Other Phone
* Email – Home
* Email – Business
* Email – Cell phone
* Assigned group
You can also assign a photo to each contact if you like as well as a unique ring tone. There are only a few ring tones on the phone so I don’t usually worry about that, but it is nice to see my wife’s photo on the front of my phone when she calls.
Each contact can be assigned a voice tag as well so you can just speak the name of the person you want to call and not have to dial the number. The voice tag feature is much more intuitive than my previous phone but still there is room for improvement. Sometimes I have to speak the name several times to get it to work because I may have used a slightly different fluctuation in my voice when I tagged the contact.
Camera and pictures
The phone has a built-in 1.3MP camera that takes decent photos outdoors but leaves something to be desired for indoor use. Photos taken in low light are very grainy and the autoflash does not help at all with this. Photos are stored on the MicroSD memory card in a DCIM folder. Supported camera resolutions are; Low (240x320), Medium (480x640) and High (960x1280) and are taken in portrait orientation.
Photos can be copied from a computer to the folder as well using the USB cable or the SD adapter; however, I have had some trouble with the camera displaying some photos from the PC. Certain photos do not display on the phone and show as a black screen with a red X in the center. I haven’t been able to figure out why this happens and it doesn’t happen with all photos. It does not seem to have anything to do with the resolution since I have altered the resolution of the photos to match the phone and some other photos that are in landscape orientation display fine with varying resolutions. If I figure out what the problem is, I will try to remember to update this review.
The camera can also be used as a web cam when on the internet and it can capture motion video as well. Motion videos are saved as .avi files and are decent quality compared to the average web cam. The motion videos can be up to 38 seconds in length and they do take up more space on the MicroSD card so if you plan to capture motion video, you may want to upgrade the MicroSD memory as I did.
MP3 player
The phone has a Media Player program that can play MP3 files. I have not tried other types of media files (except for the .avi files captured from the camera) but it does a good job of playing MP3’s. The only problem is that the memory card is so small that you can’t fit many songs on the phone. I upgraded my phone with a 2GB MicroSD card and now I have about three hours of music on my phone with plenty of room for more photos and more music.
The stereo ear buds that come with the phone are decent and MP3 playback through the ear buds is quite enjoyable. Playing MP3 music through the phone's built-in speaker is terrible quality; it is very clear and clean but sounds like music from inside a tin can. It's best to use the ear buds for music.
Web Browsing and Email
The phone is web capable but we do not have a data contract with Sprint, so I can only attest that the phone in the store was very fast at browsing and rivals the speed of our cable connection on our home PCs. Some web sites do not display properly but you can still read the text on them.
Aside from web browsing, the phone can connect to the Sprint music store to quickly download music using the Sprint Power Vision Services. The Sprint Power Vision Services can also be used to get instant weather and other on demand information as well. We do not use this service because without the data plan it costs $0.03 per Kb using the data service. I could easily run up a $400 phone bill at those rates. The data plan is an additional $15 per month per phone and we have 3 phones on our contract which would add an additional $45 per month and we really don’t need that service with high speed internet at home.
Regardless of whether you get the data plan or not, the phone is assigned an email address that you can use in emergencies to send email if needed. I tried it once just to see if it worked and it did just fine. You can even attach files from the MicroSD card like photos or MP3 music (just remember it is $0.03 per Kb without the data plan!).
Bluetooth
This phone is Bluetooth capable and my wife and I both ordered the Motorola H350 Bluetooth Headset to accompany our phones for hands free calling on the road.
I have been able to connect to my headset up to 25 feet away and calrity is good. For more information on the headset, click on the link to that review .
GPS
The phone has GPS (global positioning satellite service) built-in and can be used in emergencies for emergency services to locate you quickly. I have not used the GPS service on this phone yet but it is nice to know it is there if needed.
I noticed also that when you take a photo or video with the phone, it records the GPS information in the details of the file. It tells you the latitude and longitude where the photo or video was taken. That is not really important to me but it is kind of neat.
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Service – Sprint
We live in a very unique spot in Central Virginia, (Appomattox, Virginia). There is only one company that covers our area within any distance from our home, and that is Sprint. I have not been a big fan of Sprint over the years but they serve our purposes here and cover more of our local area than any other provider here.
My old Nokia 3588i got decent reception (or so I thought). At home on the main floor I could get a solid five bars which is the best connection you can get, but down in the basement I only got two bars which is just barely enough to make a call. I never had a call dropped in our basement (which is where I spend a lot of my time at home) so it was never a problem. But, drive three miles out to the east and you get nothing, no bars.
With my new phone, the Sanyo SCP-8400, reception is much better. I get a solid five bars in my basement all the time and I can still get a signal up to five miles out of town to the east. The tower where we get our signal is to the west and I can get a decent signal up to five miles east of home, four miles south and constant signal north and west.
If I were to keep traveling east I would pick up the signal again in about 30 miles (closer to Richmond). The phone is capable of Roaming but I do not use it in roaming mode except in emergencies because it costs too much. In most places where I do not get a signal from Sprint, I can roam if needed to make an emergency call, but to the east of Appomattox is no-phone’s land. There is no company that covers that area and almost all cell phones are useless until you get to Farmville, VA.
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Call quality
The quality of phone service is great on this phone. I can hear the person on the other end fine and they can hear me just as well. The audio is clear and free of any static or distortions. The phone comes with stereo ear buds which can be used when driving for hands free communication. The phone also has a built-in speaker phone feature; which in combination with the ear buds and voice tags allows completely hands free communication.
I have not had anyone complain about the sound quality on the other end of the line and in fact most people do not know I am on a cell phone at all unless they check the number on caller ID.
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Battery Life
The phone can last for four hours of continuous talk time. I have had it sitting on standby for a little over a week with minimal use and still had more than a quarter of battery life left in it. It takes about two hours to charge from dead, but I have never let it get that low. The longest I have had to charge it so far was a little over an hour.
Using the web, Sprint Power Vision Services, and vibrating ring can lower the battery life per charge. When the phone gets down to five minutes of talk time left, it makes an audible alarm and shuts down to preserve information in memory.
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In the box
The retail package includes the following:
* Sanyo SCP-8400 Phone
* AC battery charger
* Auto/car battery charger
* USB data cable
* 64MB MicroSD memory card
* MicroSD to SD adapter with plastic sheath
* Stereo ear buds with 3' cable and shirt clip
* Owner’s Manual
* Sprint Power Vision Network Guide
Some things I purchased additionally for my phone were:
* 2GB MicroSD memory card
* Body Glove phone casing and clip
* Motorola H350 Bluetooth Headset
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Conclusion
This is an excellent phone for use with the Sprint PCS network. I have had nothing but good experience with it so far and I have had it for over three weeks now. Call quality is excellent, reception is good and the features are great. It is more phone than I will use but the features that I do use are excellent. My wife also likes her new phone and I just bought her a 2GB memory card as well (she has had better luck with photos from the PC than I have).
The phones were on sale for $249.99 at the Sprint store in Lynchburg, Virginia but being Sprint customers already upgrading from previous phones, they gave us $150 towards a new phone each. We wound up paying $100 for each phone and that's not a bad deal at all.
Thanks for reading,
Gr8ful ;-)
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 100
Recommended for: Professionals On-the-Go - Internet and Email is a Must!
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