Sprint Summer 2006
Hands-on with Sprint's basic phones for summer: the Sanyo Katana and 2400, and Samsung A640 and A420.
Sprint this week rolled out a quartet of basic new phones for summer. They're not high-end phones with EVDO, but each phone serves a purpose in Sprint's full lineup.
The Samsung A640 is a rather sleek clamshell phone with a slick OLED outer display that disappears into the glossy black front when it's not shining. The sleek black front echoes LG's popular Chocolate phones.
Its features are mostly basic. The OLED outer display is multi-color, not full-color. That means the blue parts will always be blue, the red parts always red, etc. Unfortunately, the outer display seemed rather dim to us. OLED displays are usually very bright, but this one seemed to be the exception.
The main display is rather small at 128 x 160 pixels. The camera is only VGA resolution. However, the A640 does have Push-To-Talk and Bluetooth going for it.
It's on the small and light side, but not exceptionally so.
Both the Samsung A640 and A420 have a new high-contrast main menu option for those with poor vision:
While Sprint is marketing this feature as a major innovation, it's really nothing more than a very simple main menu theme. It would have been nice to see larger fonts throughout the menus and phonebook, for example. Unfortunately this doesn't include that.
are you kidding me?!
does anyone know who thin the katana is?
aside from the lack of EVDO and only sporting a VGA camera, what else does this phone have? does it have speakerphone, music player, or anything else like that, or is it just a basic sanyo phone that was crammed into a slimline body?
Mistake on my part...
Sorry about the quality
Also, my Canon camera is busted, so I was stuck with my crappy backup camera. That's why the photos aren't quite as good quality as we usually strive for.
I hope the article still provides some useful info and eye candy for folks.
Please feel free to ask questions.
does the katana have that click that all other sanyo's have when you flip it open or closed?
Fall EV-DO Push?
Any more details on these devices?
Nothing exciting in summer...
My Samsung a920 works ok, but won't sort my SMS messages into folders. And it won't let me add words to the T9 feature, which includes some useful common spanish words but misses a few obvious English ones. Starting movies takes about 15 seconds longer on the a920 than the Sanyo 5600, and if you get a call while watching, well, get ready to start the movie over. After you get done fast-forwarding up to where you left off, at least it has a rewind button to correct when you skip too far, unlike the Sanyo. But every time I've used it like this, its frozen the player, and I had to take the battery off to reset the phone. ...