Camera Phone Shoot-Out
For those considering buying one of these phones, the camera features are certainly only a part of the equation. Since I had two weeks with most of the phones, I learned a lot about how they worked as regular voice phones, as well. I didn't have the opportunity to test the battery life, nor did I have a chance to test them in weak signal conditions. These are just some observations I made - things that stuck out and either impressed or disappointed me.
The Sanyo and Samsung were tested with Sprint PCS. The Nokia and Motorola were tested with T-Mobile. All testing was done in downtown Philadelphia. This is important to keep in mind for my comments on voice quality, since call quality can be highly dependent on the network equipment involved, and carriers often have different equipment deployed in different markets.
Nokia 7210
Overall, the Nokia is an excellent phone. Nokia's expertise in style, usability, and engineering is readily apparent in the 7210. The phone is an engineering marvel, for its small size, light weight, tri-band internal antenna, and built-in speakerphone.
The keys, despite their unusual layout, were surprisingly easy to work with. They were very easy to feel and press. The letters on the keys could be a bit bigger, for those who aren't T9 experts, and the keypad lights are somewhat uneven, but those are minor issues. A slightly more serious issue is the side keys. They are very difficult to feel out, and very difficult to press.
The user interface also reflects Nokia's leadership in usability. The interface is very attractive, and very powerful once you learn your way around. Its slight learning curve (especially with text entry) is more than offset by the speed at which you can navigate once you're good at it.
Voice quality was good - natural and very crisp for both parties, although I noticed some very faint white noise in the background, and callers reported a slight "tinny" sound.
The 7210 also supports a good amount of customization, including downloadable full-screen wallpapers and downloadable polyphonic ringtones with synchronized vibration patterns. File formats supported are extensive, and include JPEG, GIF, and PNG for graphics.
Motorola T720i
The Motorola T720i also features impressive engineering and design. The style of the phone is conservative, but attractive. Thoughtful and clever design elements make it a joy to use.
The sides of the phone are concave, making the phone particularly easy to open and hold. The side keys are average.
The external display on the Motorola is really great. It is more reflective than most black-and-white LCDs, but also not as green. The backlight is a similarly tasteful bluish-white color. Most of the time it displays status icons, and the time and date in an attractive, easy-to-read font. But it is also a full-graphic display, and shows neat little animations for incoming calls and new messages. When the phone is open, the external display cleverly displays the Motorola logo, but upside-down, to be right-side-up for someone looking at you talking on the phone.
A similarly clever design touch is the polyphonic ringtone speaker, which is located behind the silver "M" logo in the outer shell, so that the black "M" is actually a small speaker grille. The T720i also features what I would consider perfect spring action on the folder hinge. It snaps open and closed easily and solidly.
Moving to the inside of the phone, the keys are by far the best of the bunch. They are easy to see, feel, and press, and should be no trouble for fingers of all sizes. The send and end keys are situated on opposite sides from most other phones, but that is easy to get used to.
The final touch of genius I noticed was that in power save mode, the keypad backlight (which is excellent) only illuminates when needed. Each time the phone is opened or a key is pressed, a small light sensor below the star key determines the brightness of the room, and turns the keypad backlighting on or off as necessary. Why don't more phones have this?
As for voice quality, the Motorola performed slightly better than the Nokia. Both phones sounded excellent, but the Motorola did not have the slight background noise that the Nokia did. Where the Nokia sounded "crisp", the Motorola sounded more "smooth". Callers also reported slightly better sound than the Nokia.
The T720i features Motorola's newest interface, which is fully customizable. Menus items and shortcuts can easily be re-arranged to match the features you use most. Unfortunately, navigation was not as fast as the other phones, since the T720i lacks the ability to select menu items by number.
Samsung A500
The Samsung SPH-A500, in my personal opinion, is quite possibly the best-looking phone in the world. Of course, it shares this honor with its European cousin, the SGH-T100. It's one of the first phones I would use the word "sexy" to describe, in the way that a fine sports car is sexy. It just has an incredible slickness, and a wonderful feel to it.
The industrial design is good overall. The shape is smooth - it slides effortlessly in and out of any pocket, and it is a pleasure to hold. The side keys are the best of the four, by far. The external display is large, and displays large, attractive icons and text.
Opening it up, the design is equally attractive. The key labels are large, and the keypad backlight is a piercing cobalt blue. The keys themselves, however, are where problems start to crop up. The number keys are flat and flush with the phone. It's difficult to feel them out, and they are a bit stiff.
The absolute worst part, however, is the placement of the "OK" key. I have no idea what the engineer who made this decision was thinking. Five-way direction pads (with a button in the middle) are wonderful because they are so intuitive - you scroll to what you want and just press down to select. But the button in the middle of the A500's d-pad only works as a shortcut to the browser, and even then it only works from standby, and you have to hold it down for a second. Why on earth is the most important key on the phone made to be the most useless?
So in their infinite wisdom, they put the OK key to left of the keypad. I was hoping to find that this would be easy to get used to, but unfortunately that wasn't the case. I discovered that it was very easy to press the left key when I meant to press OK, or vice-versa. I really don't understand why it is set up this way. To me, it just seems blindingly obvious that the middle key should be "OK".
On a more pleasant note, the A500's graphic interface was quite attractive, easy-to-use, and powerful. It's just a shame that the clearly misplaced OK key makes an otherwise great phone unnecessarily difficult to use. I'm worried that other upcoming Sprint phones from Samsung, such as the SPH-A600, also appear to have this flaw. I sincerely hope Sprint and/or Samsung reconsiders making this mistake again before releasing the A600.
On the voice-quality front, the Samsung performed acceptably for a CDMA phone. CDMA's somewhat "choppy" sound was evident, but not bothersome. Sound was relatively crisp. Callers reported that I sounded "distant", but that it wasn't major or bothersome.
Not to start a holy war among the technology faithful, but there was simply no question that both GSM phones (the Nokia and Motorola) produced much better sound quality than the CDMA phones (the Samsung and Sanyo). Again, the networks also play an important role in sound quality, but at least here in Philadelphia, comparing Sprint PCS versus T-Mobile, the GSM phones on T-Mobile sounded much better to me, and callers reported the same.
Sanyo 5300
I've already covered most of the major good points about the Sanyo 5300. In addition to the great displays and advanced camera functions, the phone was also easily customizable. The major drawback is definitely the size. But between the built-in camera and the huge display, I'm not sure how they could have made it much smaller. It's not huge, but it's thicker than the other phones by a good margin, which will make a noticeable bulge in your pocket.
The interface is kind of ugly, but it's powerful and easy to use. The 5-way navigation keys are great - they're what the Samsung's should have been. The two soft keys and the web and camera shortcut keys are similarly great. The number keys, however, are flat and mostly flush with the phone, like the A500's. This makes it a bit harder to feel out the keys, although an easy-to-feel sunken "5" key does make it a bit easier.
The side keys are oddly located on the right side, making them difficult to press while holding the phone with your right hand. They are also small and recessed, which prevents most accidental key presses, but makes them quite difficult to press intentionally.
The polyphonic ringtone speaker is located on the back. When holding the phone, I found the natural position for my index finger was often right over the speaker grille, blocking the sound almost completely. This wasn't a major issue, but made it difficult to hear confirmation tones and other alerts when I wasn't careful. However, when laying flat on a desk, the sound reverberates off the surface, and sounds really fantastic. The Sanyo includes an eclectic collection of ringtones, some of which sound really incredible. The Sanyo, like the Nokia, supports several different ringtone formats.
Sound quality was slightly better than the A500, although perhaps slightly less "crisp". As many other reviews have pointed out, the speaker volume is unusually low, even at the highest setting. This could be a problem in noisy environments, but in most settings it didn't cause a problem for me.
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