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"Best Cell Phone I have Owned!" on by KevinMiles78
Pros: Excellent Clear Reception, Ease of Use, Design, Durability, Quality
Cons: None in my opinion, this phone is perfect for what it offers and what I wanted.
Summary: To me this phone has well exceeded my expectations and re-affirmed my commitment to the Sanyo brand name. This is my third Sanyo cell phone and the ONLY reason I change phones is to upgrade for newer phones with more features. In fact my last two Sanyo's I gave to friends to use and they are still working perfectly. I absolutely LOVE this new MM-8300 for many reasons, the reception is like standing right next to the person, the phone is very user friendly with easy to understand menus (that even my computer challenged father can understand) and it's a very well made phone. I have had NO problems with the battery as others mention, in fact this is the first phone I have had where it outlast an entire day of my web surfing, emailing and downloading without running down. I find myself almost forgetting to plug this phone into the charger because it takes days to run down enough to require charging. The picture quality from this phone is excellent too, with digital zoom and video! Also this phone is very durable, obviously by accident, this phone was dropped (on a concrete floor) and not one scratch and it works perfectly! So if you don't require Blue Tooth technology (which I had and disliked anyway) Please GET THIS PHONE! You won't regret it. Thank you for reading my review, I honestly hope it assists you in choosing a cellular phone. Kevin (Ohio)
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"This is a really good phone" on by 208GadgetGeek
Pros: Good sound quality, good features and user friendly menus.
Cons: So so camera and bad green backlighting on keypad.
Summary: The Sanyo MM 8300 is an awesome phone. I was in a tough spot when buying this phone because I was on the road and my Sanyo 8200 just died a horrible death.
The 8200 was the absolute worst cell phone I've ever had!!! I was very reluctant to get another Sanyo product. The salesman at the Sprint store really talked this phone up( as salesman do for...well...everything they're trying to sell...) but I eventually bought it after looking through the phone and checking it out.
I was happy that I got it. WORLDS better then an 8200!
The big thing for me is sound quality. I'm an audio engineer, so I'm much happier when things sound good. The sound of the calls on this phone are pretty good. All the distortion from the 8200 is gone. The speakerphone works well too. Callers on the other end say that the sound quality of the microphone is good too.
The fact that Sanyo has the sense to still put an analog roaming feature in their phones is a nice thing. I'm on the road a LOT! Sprint has a pretty good digital roaming network, but for those times when you are on a rural highway in Montana or Wyoming or even I 70 going through some parts of Colorado, and the only thing you can get is an analog signal, you'll be happy when you have to make a call that just can't wait. The Treo 650 (as well as a few of sprint's really popular phones)doesn't even have an anlog option.
The menus in the 8300 are much better. The function that you wanted at the top of a particular menu in the 8200 but were somwhere else, are now right at the top of the menus in this phone.
This phone has the normal VGA camera that does still pics as well as video. As far as cell phones go, the camera does the job. Of course you are not going to get great pics but it works for taking pics with your friends and stuff like that. The camcorder function is cool. Not great video quality but it gets the job done.
The drawbacks of this phone are minimal. Very minimal. I really don't like the green backlighting on the keypad. They need to get a bright blue or white behind those keys. Battery life could be better.
All in all, the Sanyo MM 8300 is a really good phone. -
"good phone with some flaws" on by nboyer
Pros: great signal strength, nice screen, some well thought out features
Cons: hard to hear unless the phone is held "just so"
Summary: First of all this phone has great signal strenth. I thought all phones using the same network would get the same reception but this phone gets much stronger signal than my last two Samsung phones. I could never get a signal in my grocery store, or my favorate coffee shop, or my kitchen with either of my old Samsung phones but this Sanyo 8300 gets signal in all of those places. That in and of itself makes me really like this phone and outways many of its problems.
One of those problems is that the sound quality is not as good as my last phone. The speaker in the ear piece does not seem to be very good. It has a tinny quality and you have to hold the phone against your head in exactly the right place to be able to hear anything at all. If the phone slips up or down half an inch you can not hear very well. I think once you have had the phone for a long time you get used to how you have to hold it (or buy an earjack) but it is still a problem if you hand the phone over to someone to talk who is not used to it.
The camera is not great either. The "flash" is not really a flash but a little LED type thing that shines a few inches ahead of the camera if you turn it on. You need really bright light (a bright sunny day - no amount of indoor light seems to be enough) to take a decent picture with the phone. There seems to be banding on the bottom parts of the picture in low light, and it is hard to get a picture out of it that does not make someone look bad (between the low resolution, grayed out colors in most light, and the fact that the little "fisheye" lens tends to distort everything giving huge noses and foreheads). Still, both the still pictures and videos are nice novelty fun. The phone has a function to order prints of your pictures from the phone. I have not tried this service, but I can not imagine how the pictures are high enough resolution to print.
The screen is really nice though. (pictures uploaded to the phone from a computer look great on it). I love the fact that you can set a picture to go with each person in your address book (either from the camera or uploaded) and it flashes on the little mini screen on the outside of the camera along with the caller id when they are calling. (Setting a video as a ringer is not so great though as the sound quality of the videos is so bad you would never hear your phone ring and the video does not seem to play on that little outer screen where you would be able to see it.)
One thing that they seem to have fixed from the 8200 is that the 8200 opens with a cheap sounding click. This 8300 opens much smoother and that gives the phone a nicer feel.
It does have some other well thought out features. The calculator is the best one I have that I have ever seen on a phone. You can acually use it with out having to swich back and forth between modes every time you want to use a "+" or "=" sign.
One thing that seems different about this phone and previous models is that it is much more integrated into sprints fee based application network. There are many programs that you can buy and download onto your phone from your phone. For example it has a little weather application that will give you the days weather forcast in your area for $3 a month.
The phone comes with no games, only demo versions that you can only play for 60 seconds before it stops you and asks you to pay to download the whole game. The games are mostly about $6 which isn't too bad and they look great (you can get a very nice tetris and a very cool spy game called splinter cell) but I still still one or two should have been included on the phone for free.
One thing that really bugs me is that some of the games you have to pay a monthly fee to play. There is a great looking Ms. Pac Man demo on the phone that plays like the arcade with all the real sounds that I might have payed for if it was a one time fee but it is $3 a month.
My phone also has a bug with how it deals with picture mail. I have a pcsvision package. But everytime I go to send a picture or video from the phone it makes me buy picture mail and video mail for $5 each a month. I keep talking to customer service. They keep telling me that picture mail and video mail are included in my pcsvision package and taking the additional redundant service off, but then I want to send a picture again and my phone turns them back on. That bug is a pain in the neck.
The last feature that I think has a problem is also really a sprint pcs vision problem but it makes problems with one of the phone's features: that is the picture/video mail. One of the things I upgraded to this phone for was that I liked the idea of the video mail and the fact that you could send them to another pcs phone or someone's email. This service has a lot of kinks though. If you send a couple of videos to an email they get sprint pcs ad email with a tiny preview picture that you have to click on to go to a website with a larger preview picture, etc... and after a bunch of clicks you can download a ziped up quicktime video. This sounds fine but Quicktime is primarily a Macintosh video format and Zip is primarily a Windows based compression format, so my experience is that most people I email videos to from my phone can either uncompress them but not watch them, or might be able to watch them but can not get them uncompressed. This is further compounded by the fact that the "get the quicktime player" link that the Sprint PCS website gives you when your Windows user friend can not play the video is an old broken link (or at least it was when I tried it hopefully they have fixed it).
That is however a small digression from talking about this phone, which is, really, quite good.Updated
One more thought - I do not undersand the point of ready-link. It seems to be a selling point of this phone. Perhaps it is Sprint's responce to Nextel's popular walkie talkie feature, but no one I know has signed up for it. Since it costs $5 a month to be able to call all sprintpcs customers as much as you want - why would you pay $10 a month to have what seems like just another way to speed dial the seven sprintpcs customers with ready-link? -
"Great phone for Sprint PCS users" on by nagystrici
Pros: Excellent call reception, multimedia, streaming TV
Cons: Battery life is average, no MP3 player
Summary: I almost switched from Sprint as my Samsung phone wasn't picking up a signal in my place of work. This Sanyo MM-8300 is excellent for call reception, and call quality is great. I found that most every Sprint PCS salesperson uses a Sanyo phone, as the phones are so reliable.
I love the enhanced Sprint TV feature which gives live streaming TV from channels like Fox News. I suggest that you check out MobiTV.com to see which phones are optimized for the faster signal streaming for this cell phone feature. Of course, the MM-8300 is one of them. The other phone features such as voice memo, alarm clock, web browsing are great too. I also use the call alarm to remind me to call someone that I've listed in my phone's address book. Finally, the speaker phone is strong enough to use in the car. Be sure to set the speaker volume down as it will overmodulate if set too high.
The camera produces decent pics, and some have been good enough to print. I can immediately send the photos to my personal or business email address. This has been very handy at work and play. On a lighter note, I've made a nasty habit of sending photos of myself drinking beer to friends and family, but I digress...
The MM-8300 can also be customized on the outer phone casing, by replacing the front outer edge of the phone with a different color sleeve. I have the silver phone, and inserted the metalic blue sleeve in place of the plain silver one. You can buy other colors too. It's nice to have a unique looking phone, as so many look the same.
I haven't become a big user or fan of Bluetooth, so missing that feature is not important to me. I don't think that I will ever want a bluetooth (wireless) earpiece attached to my head as I have concerns about the electomagnetic radio waves & potential cancer links. I like flip phones like the Sanyo MM-8300, with the pull out antenna that extends away from my head. It's probably more healthy to keep the antenna as far away from your brain as possible.
For the money, this is a great value among the Sprint phones. I just wish that this one was equipped with an MP3 player, and a data card slot such as the newer Sanyo MM phones...but they will cost you much more money, at least as of this writing. -
"Poor replacement for the Sanyo MM-7400" on by Pure D
Pros: Good quality camera as is expected from Sanyo
Cons: Poor battery life, poor graphics and no Bluetooth
Summary: I received this phone as a replacement for the MM-7400 and was totally amazed at what was missing from what I had come to expect of Sanyo. Many features such as voice caller ID have been removed. The fine display is replaced by a "so-so" smaller screen. While there are a few additions this phone is really about making a low end/ low cost entry camera phone sans the pizzazz of any real multimedia phone. Sprint and Sanyo both had better step up their game.
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