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The phone also comes with a host of built-in ring tones, including eight polyphonic (32-chord) and eight monophonic melodies. The variety is essential because without access to Sprint's online site, it isn't apparent how you can add ring tones. Other options include a vibrate alert; text (but not multimedia) messaging; and a standard selection of productivity tools such as a calendar, an alarm clock, a stopwatch, a world clock, and a calculator.
We were surprised to see a speakerphone and voice dialing on such a basic phone. You also get a voice-memo tool that records up to 12 audio messages, each of which can be 18 seconds long. As stated previously, since the SCP-200 is designed primarily for making voice calls, there's no Web browser or e-mail access. There also are no preloaded games and no way to download them from Sprint. You can personalize the mobile with a variety of wallpaper, screensavers, and sounds.
We were impressed with the call quality and signal strength on the triband (CDMA 800/1900; AMPS 800) Sanyo SCP-200. We tested the phone in the New York metropolitan area on Sprint's CDMA digital network and consistently got a clean, clear signal. The speakerphone was also able to pump up caller's volume to a decent volume, while still making our voice heard. Callers said they could hear us clearly, although there were a few complaints about background noise when we made calls on the street.Battery time was less than stellar, however. We were able to get only 3 hours of talk time out of the SCP-200, even in digital mode; that is less than the phone's rated 3.3 hours. If talk time is your priority, you will want to invest in the extended-life battery, which Sanyo claims will deliver as much as 5.8 hours of talk time in digital mode. For standby time, we managed 7 days on a single charge compared with the promised time of 13 days. According to the FCC, the SCP-200 has a digital SAR rating of 1.18 watts per kilogram and an analog SAR rating of 1.36 watts per kilogram.
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