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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Good
Detailed editors' rating - Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 15 reviews
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Product summary
The good: The Sanyo RL4930 has a speakerphone, support for Sprint's Ready Link push-to-talk service, long standby battery life, and analog roaming.
The bad: The Sanyo RL4930 has a dull, bulky design with tiny keypad buttons, and audio quality is inconsistent.
The bottom line: The Sanyo RL4930 offers a couple of useful features, but if you're looking for a ReadyLink phone, there are better options available.
Specifications: Carrier: Sprint PCS ; Band / mode: CDMA2000 1X 1900 / AMPS 800 ; Talk time: Up to 330 min ; See full specs
CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 02/09/2006
- Updated on: 03/08/2006
To be perfectly frank, the Sanyo RL4930 is not a looker. A dull candy bar shape, along with a basic-gray color scheme and a protruding antenna, makes it more like a cordless phone than a mobile device. Also, considering it measures 4.5 by 2 by 1 inches and weighs 4.4 ounces, it's not compact by any means. On the upside, a rubber coating on either spine adds a touch of durability, but the extendable antenna is rather flimsy.
The Sanyo RL4930's 65,000-color display measures 1.6 inches (128x112 pixels) and is the best thing about the handset's design. Although its overall resolution is a bit washed out, it's nonetheless fine for viewing the user-friendly menus. You can adjust the contrast, the font size, and the backlighting time, but you can't alter the brightness.
Below the Sanyo RL4930's display are the main navigation controls with a standard Sanyo design. There's a five-way toggle that acts as a shortcut to messaging, and the phone book has a menu where you can program more shortcuts, as well as a My Content folder for storing games and other downloaded files. The toggle is large enough, but the other navigation controls may trouble users with larger fingers. Two soft keys, dedicated Web and Back buttons, and the Talk and End/power keys are all much too small. However, we liked the fact that the Back buttons double as a key lock if held down and that there's a dedicated speakerphone button below the keypad. Speaking of the keypad, the buttons are raised just above the surface of the phone, which made it easy to dial by feel. They're also decently sized and lit by a green backlighting. The only controls on the outside of the phone are the Ready Link button and a wide volume rocker on the left spine.
The Sanyo RL4930 has an average feature set that is useful without being remarkable. The phone book holds 500 contacts, with room in each entry for six phone numbers, Web and e-mail addresses, and notes. Be advised, though, that the phone book can hold only 700 numbers total. You can pair contacts with a picture and one of 17 polyphonic (32-chord) ring tones, but there are no caller groups. On the other hand, you can use caller groups in the separate Ready Link phone book, which holds 400 contacts total.
Other features include a vibrate mode, a calendar, an alarm clock, a calculator, a stopwatch, a world clock, PC syncing, text messaging, and a WAP 2.0 wireless Web browser. You can activate the speakerphone before you make a call, which is a nice touch, and the voice recorder's ability to hold up to 130 minutes impressed us. Total memory for downloads is 2MB.
We tested the triband Sanyo RL4930 (CDMA 800/1900; AMPS 800) in San Francisco using Sprint's service. Call quality was satisfactory with good volume, but voices sounded hollow on our end. Callers had trouble hearing us from time to time, and they could tell we were using a cell phone. Speakerphone calls were relatively clear, and through the speaker faces of the phone, they were loud enough. Ready Link calls were on a par with normal calls: fine but not exceptional.
Sanyo rates the talk time at 5.5 hours, and we got 5 in our tests. Standby time was fantastic; the phone lasted an impressive 20 days. According to FCC radiation tests, the Sanyo RL4930 has a digital SAR rating of 0.37 watt per kilogram and an analog SAR rating of 1.13 watts per kilogram.
- See more CNET content tagged:
- Sanyo Electric Co.,
- Nextel Communications Inc.,
- Sprint Nextel,
- handset,
- push-to-talk
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- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 15 reviews
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