The idea of it is actually giving me chills. And not the good chills. You are smarter than this, right?

Most phone buyers, apparently, are not. Want proof? There's an eBay application on the phone, subject to (you guessed it) another surcharge. The phone comes pre-configured with the top eBay searches you might want to run: Dragon Ball Z, Atkins Diet, Neopets, and Britney Spears.

I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.

For parents considering giving these phones to kids, it could be a real problem. There doesn't appear to be a way to turn off the giant sucking sound, so if you give your kid this nice new phone, expect to see your phone bills clogged with lots of little items adding up to a big, unexpected payout.

I know this is the business model for cellular companies in the new millenium, but it's unpleasant and, in some cases, clearly over-priced.

Should you buy?
Should you buy an A920 phone, which Sprint's store lists at $119, or a smartphone, which will cost you $300 more? You can certainly buy a lot of ringtones, rinky-dink backgrounds, and Rickie Lee MP3s with the $300 you'll be saving.

There are three key differences between a cellular phone and a smartphone. First, most smartphones come with HotSync or ActiveSync software that lets you manage your personal information on the PC, but synchronize that information with the phone. I find this invaluable, since typing in all those numbers on the phone is enough to send you over the edge. It is true that there are some programs that do make phone-sync products, but not all phones are supported and those that are supported are often not supported well.

Second, if you want to install some new piece of software on your Treo or Pocket PC phone, you can do so easily. For example, I recently received Workout Tracker in for review and since we've got an office gym, I'm going to evaluate how well it works tracking my weight lifting sessions. I could never install that on the A920, but it's a breeze to put it on the Treo. There are thousands of add-on programs for Pocket PCs and Palm PDAs (and, by extension, their smartphones). There are far less for the A920 -- and all of them must be purchased from Sprint.

And this brings us to the question of freedom. Everything I tried to do using the A920 involved signing up for a new Sprint service. If I wanted to send an email message, I couldn't use my own server, I had to use theirs. Ditto for pictures, uploads, downloads, and so forth. If you use a Smartphone, you get to determine what you can and can't do. If you use a regular phone like the A920, it's either Sprint's way or the highway.

So there's your choice. The A920 is a heck of a lot of phone for $119. And that's not even counting the potential of an EV-DO link for your laptop (which we didn't have time to test). But you've got limited control over your phone's environment and you're getting a new charge for everything you do. On the other hand, the smartphones are far more expensive out of the gate, but there are very few incremental charges. You know what you're spending and you spend on it once.