Full Review

Intro:
What would James Bond have done with a converged Palm phone? Would he EVER have pulled out a phone like the Treo 650 and blown his (and Q branch's) cover operating that gadget for EVERYTHING? I think not. Gone are the days of style driving function in the new converged PDA world.

Do I need a camera on it? Nope, got one already, works fine.
Do I need SMS/IM? Nope, and when I did, I got a Blackberry. Do I need a MP3 player? Got one.
A SD card slot? Not really.
Bluetooth? Nope.
A fast Wi-fi capability? Well, maybe that, but don't tell anyone.

That is where the sleek SPH-i550 comes in. Here is a tiny clamshell phone that can do a lot, but not everything, and that's OK in my book. It was also OK with my technophobe wife too, so I bought her a matching one.

Phone Features:

Rather than list an exhaustive list of features (which you can get from the Sprint website), I am going to discuss the features I use most. First, there is the phone handset and it is a great design with clear sound, loud enough to use outdoors on a noisy street, and just large enough to crook in your neck like a regular phone. In general, it holds tri-band connections (Sprint, Digital and Analog Roam CDMA stable), but I am frequently finding that my calls drop with a "Signal Faded" message more often than I would like, while my GPRS brethren just keep chatting along. Not sure why either when signal strength shows 2-3 bars.


The phone number buttons and screen are are backlit in blue and easy to use in low light environments with my big fingers. One feature I like is the recent call list, which is surprisingly NOT a native Palm app, like it was on the Kyocera 6135. The only way to access it is by pressing the talk button while not engaged on a call. When you scroll down the list, you can find several months of calls and their incoming/outgoing/missed call status and even add them to your Palm address book. The only features I would have liked to have seen is a call duration metric and an list export feature. Maybe on my next Palm phone.

My particular handset has lasted me about a year, but it is a fragile bird. For example, the power adaptor can plug directly into the handset as well into the two battery charger, but the flat multi-pin plug is flimsy and needs gentle coaxing to provide a connection to charge. Other fragility issues exist with breakage of the rear battery catch (on my wife's i550), which required the whole handset to be replaced. As a clamshell design, it folds up pretty small and hides nicely in a shirt pocket. That said, the fact that the i550 doesn't look like a Palm, means that I can use it in situations where fiddling with a complex gadget would be scoffed at or draw attention, like a business meeting or around my gadget-friendly kids. Sometimes its just better to be an undercover geek than SuperGeek.

PDA features:

As a basic Palm, it rocks. In fact, I love that I don't have to use the stylus that much with the Palm application features, as the OK and Back buttons seem to be active on most screens and are conveniently placed to the left and right of the silver up/down rocker. On the other hand, it would have been nice to use these buttons as left/right scroll buttons instead of using the stylus. Most standard Palm features can be accessed by some combination of the pulldown menu button on the left side and up/down scroll if you are singlehanded, one-upping the old Palm/Zire design 4 button and single rocker paradigm. If you like using the telescoping stylus, you can still operate the phone with it and use the Grafitti pad and programmable buttons nicely.

Compatibility with older Palm 3.x apps is great and the processing speed is quick enough for most non-Blazer apps. Score two for Palm as the best converged PDA operating system. Speaking of Blazer, well, it is not exactly all that. The scroll speed, reload speed from cache, 1xrtt Sprint Vision download speed and page processing is pretty much like an old school 33.6K modem time on an intel 386 running Windows 3.1. Barely passing: I actually use it, but I hate it. Strangely enough, my i550 has developed some calibration "bugs" that may be related to the touch screen that only surface in Blazer, that make it difficult to use the stylus to press on links. It is as if the link were located elsewhere on the page. Recalibrating the stylus sometimes helps and rebooting the i550 sometimes helps. Go figure. Probably time for a new handset.

Battery Life:

Pretty poor. You have to wonder why a phone ships with two batteries in the box, one normal life and one extended life. I get about 12-15 hours standby/talk on normal and about 18-20 hours standby/talk on extended. Just figure that you have to charge up this baby every night and keep the other one charged up in your bag.

Other Misc. features:

Ring tones, mostly cheesy, not downloadable.
Voice recognition, pretty good.
Voice recording, in a 16Meg non-upgradeable memory. Useless.