Review: ZTE C88
Screen
The C88 has two displays. The exterior display is fairly small, and even though it is full color, only shows your typical status indicators: time, date, signal, messages, battery life, etc. The interior screen is nice and bright. We wish the resolution were higher, but most icons and graphics appeared fairly smooth, with few jagged edges. Colors looked good and true to life. As for outdoor viewability, the C88 performed flawlessly. Even in bright sunlight, everything on the screen was readable. Unless you had direct glare reflecting off the screen, there was no problem seeing the screen outdoors.
Signal
The signal was all over the place on the C88. Keep in mind, MetroPCS operates in a handful of cities, including Atlanta, Miami, Tampa, San Francisco / Sacramento, Dallas / Fort Worth, and Detroit. So the C88 was roaming where I live in NJ. Since MetroPCS uses CDMA-1xRTT technology, it is likely roaming onto Sprint's and/or Verizon's networks. The signal indicator fluctuated up and down depending on where I was standing. It was in constant motion, and you could watch it swing from 1 to 5 bars as you walked across the room. Where I live, Sprint coverage happens to be fairly poor, but Verizon's coverage is strong. Perhaps the signal variance was a factor of it hopping form one network to the other. Unfortunately, the vault test completely befuddled the C88. We were never able to complete a call from the NJ vault, and it lost signal altogether three-quarters of the time we were in the vault.
Sound
Given the signal issues, I was not too surprised that the C88 had less-than-stellar sound quality. During calls, voices sounded like they were talking to you through a cardboard tube. I had no problems understanding the people I was speaking with, but it sounded like they were calling from 1991. There's no other way I can describe it. The speaker phone was decent. It had the same cardboard-tube-from-1991 action going on. If you dial the sound up all the way, the sound quality degraded just a little bit, but there was no distortion.
The C88's ringer was able to get loud enough so that you won't miss calls even if you are on a different floor from where the phone is located, but I wouldn't be surprised if you miss calls when inside a noisy bar.
Battery
The battery lasted about 3 days per charge. The battery level indicator always appeared to have a full charge. Then, mysteriously, on the third day it would drop to almost empty. So be forewarned. 3 days is what you're going to get. But this was with minimal use. Connecting the C88 to a Bluetooth headset stole a day of battery life, even if left on standby.
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