FIGURE B


The company ships a 32MB card with the phone. Roll over picture for a larger image.

I honestly believe we've reached the point of too small with these cards. It's almost necessary to use a tweazer to handle them, and the potential for data loss is huge. It's impressive that memory gets that small, but scary as well.

Rounding out the big features, the phone has Bluetooth and a 1.3 megapixel camera. It's not great, but you can certainly take fair pictures using the phone.

The service
Technologically, the phone is very impressive. I still find it astounding that so much can be crammed into such a small device. Unfortunately, the phone's Java-based software was often cranky. For example, it took three resets of the phone before I could get the video feed to work. Instead, I regularly got the blank "Attention" screen you can see in Figure C.

FIGURE C


The phone wants to tell me something, I know it does. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Admittedly, the battery was low, but it would have been nice if the phone said "The battery is low" and not just a blank "Attention" box. It also took a number of tries to get into the Sprint Music Store. First, I had to download an update, which failed. Then I had to download it again, and it failed. And then I gave up.

A few weeks later, I decided to pick the phone up out of the reviews rack and try again, and after two more download attempts, the music store upgrade finally worked.

While much of the raw technology of the phone is nothing short of amazing, the implementation of the Java-based user experience was, frankly, what you'd expect from a phone. In other words, it could have been better and more reliable.

The biggest issue with the various Sprint Power Vision features is that everything's got a price. Want a song? It'll cost you $2.50 (a whole lot more than it does, say, on the Apple Music Store). But then, here, you're a captive user. Want to watch CNN or Adult Swim on your video phone? You can, but Adult Swim will cost you $3.99 a month.

Sending an email, getting a message, sending a photo, posting a photo, downloading a game, downloading a song, watching video -- everything's nickel and dime, except each nickel is about $2.50 and each dime about $3.99. It can add up quickly and, honestly, most of it's crap.

It gets worse. Want to buy a ringtone? It'll cost you $2.50. Do you really like it? Want to use it after 90 days? Pay another $2.50. That's right, you buy these things for way more than they're worth, and then you buy them again and again and again.

Want to buy a game? How about Wheel of Fortune? Seriously. You can buy the Wheel of Fortune game for $2.99 (plus tax) a month. That's right, each month you have to re-buy your Wheel of Fortune game.

I'll admit I'm a bit of a gaming snob, but if you download and pay for Wheel of Fortune each month for $2.99, someone needs to use the cellular phone locator service to find you and slap you. There ought to be some kind of Wheel of Fortune rapid-response, slappin' upside the head service your ever-lovin' friends can subscribe to so you don't go and download the Wheel of Fortune game.