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9 out of 9 people found this review helpful
3.5 stars
"good phone with some flaws"
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?
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