Information addicts will have fun with Sprint's On Demand Internet service. You can get up-to-the-minute news, sports scores, and stock market news. And since the phone has GPS capability, you can access localized movie and TV listings, weather reports, and maps for your current location. Finally, there's an online phone book and dictionary. The map we pulled up was about a half a mile off.
The Sanyo MM-9000's 1.3-megapixel camera is excellent with a fair number of options, but you get only three image resolutions--960x1,280, 480x640, and 240x320. You can set the flash to automatic, on, or off. The 20X zoom worked well, as did the macro feature, which allows you to take up-close-and-personal shots of people, perfect for the photo caller-ID feature. Other camera options include a self-timer, brightness and white-balance adjustments, nine fun frames, three quality settings, eight color choices, and seven picture modes. You can shoot up to 120 minutes of video clips with sound if you have the larger Mini SD card; otherwise, they max out at 30 seconds. Two video resolutions are available--176x144 and 128x96--and editing options are similar to the still camera's. When finished with your shots and videos, you can send them to a friend or save them to the phone. Memory space depends on the image size--up to 351 pictures at the lowest resolution or 33 at the highest. You can also save to the included 16MB Mini SD memory card. Sprint's PictBridge lets you print directly to a PC with the included USB cable. Unfortunately, our computer insisted on installing a driver from a nonexistent CD.
Picture quality for the Sanyo MM-9000 was good but nothing spectacular. Edges were slightly fuzzy, and colors weren't sharp, but it's better than those of a VGA camera. The video camcorder, which captures only seven frames per second, is obviously not like watching TV, but we were pleasantly surprised by the quality. The camcorder handles quick movement with ease, and the videos are not as pixelated as you might expect.
You can personalize the Sanyo MM-9000 with a variety of wallpaper, color tones, and sounds. You can always get more options if you want them, and you can download additional ring tones as well; you get 18MB of integrated storage. The handset supports MIDI, 13K QCELP, CMX ringer, MP3, AAC, and AAC+ custom files. We were disappointed, however, that we couldn't preview the polyphonic ring tones or screensavers available on the Sprint network before buying them. We need to be able to hear what portion of the song the ring tone will play, and can they really expect us to buy a screensaver based on the description? True to Sprint's usual fashion, you get demo versions of three Java (J2ME) games--Ms. Pac-Man, Tetris, and Jamdat Bowling. That said, we appreciate the airplane mode, so you can still use the games and the voice recorder without the RF functions.
We tested the dual-band (CDMA 800/1900; EV-DO) Sanyo MM-9000 in the San Francisco area using Sprint's network. Call quality was exceptional, and the reception remained strong in typical problem areas. Callers said we sounded clear, and they could not tell the difference between an outside and an inside call, nor could they tell we were using a cell phone. We did not get any interference from the computer or the car speakers. Calls over the speakerphone and the included headset were clear as well.The Sanyo MM-9000 music player's sound is decent, although the tunes start to get distorted at the louder levels. Of course, with the speaker on the back of the phone, you lose a lot of the sound when watching video, but it doesn't make much of a difference because of the loud volume setting. Overall, we were impressed with the quality and the speed of downloaded content and streaming video. The media player also launched very quickly and didn't run into any compression issues. However, it eats up battery life. We were also impressed with the Web capability, which was far better than the majority of browsers we tested.
The Sanyo MM-9000's battery life is inconsistent. Although we got 3.5 hours of talk time in our lab tests and beat the listed talk time of 3.2 hours, we had to recharge the phone a couple of times a day if we used it often. Also, heavy use of applications such as streaming video lowered the battery life to a skimpy 1.5 hours. Standby time was better, however, at 11 days. The phone did heat up slightly when used continually for talking, but it did not when used for the Internet or other media services. According to FCC radiation tests, the Sanyo MM-9000 has a digital SAR rating of 0.12 watts per kilogram.
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