[juniorhawk]

Well after much pain and several lost Ebay auctions, I finally put my hands on a T608 from Sprint PCS telesales.

First Impressions:
It is very small for a candybar style phone. Not quite as small as the new AT&T models but to be honest I don't want to feel like I am holding a matchbox up to my head (and please don’t hide my buttons in a slip panel either. I mean really).

So the phone is small, and very light. I don’t know what the "extended battery" looks like, but after the battery and flimsy battery cover slips on, there isn't much room inside the phone for more hardware.
The phone powers up pretty quickly - as fast as my a500 and a lot faster than the Sanyo 5300. Once powered up I found that the menus are as rumoured: SLOW. Amazingly slow. The menus are patheticly slow, but good once rendered. Still at times I am amazed the phone's programming made it past the QA people with a menu system this slow (albeit good).

The buttons are tiny. I don’t have huge hands, but I have to use my nail to type in phone numbers. I really would have loved about 2 extra millimeters between each key - would that have killed them? The rounded buttons on either side of the joystick are slippery and easy to mispress, and slip off. They joystick scares the crap out of me. I feel like each time I slip it into my pocket, the stick is going to snap off and leave me with a plastic nub. This is sounding like a pretty negative review huh? Well part of this is the fact that I am a flip phone die hard but had to have this Bluetooth model.

The ringers are the normal sort of polyphonic tones. Some songs, some regular. At least this phone has a normal ringtone. I wanted to scream when I got my n400 and found that "Waltz" was the closest to a normal ringer for a phone I carry around at the office. Unreal.

The battery life is stinky. I would say that I got about an hour of talk time and started looking for a 110 plug.

Wireless Web stuff functions excellently. Thanks to the portals here I was able to log into my Yahoo mail and let the phone set cookies and keep me logged in. Awesome. Checked my eBay auctions fine too. The text messaging is typical of SprintPCS. Since it is not true sms it is a downright crap-fest. Craptastic! That is not the phones fault though.

I am bidding on the advanced music mute and hands free "over the stereo" kit for my truck. I have heard this is completely awesome with this phone. I will update this review when I get that product, but the hands free system is pretty much why I bought the phone. I am very excited about that

Ok here is the important part of the review. This is the best wireless "talking device" or wireless "PHONE" I have ever used. Ever. Including the much heralded Timeport 87 series (startac offshoot). It dosent creak, pop, or hiss at all. It also has a feature I missed very badly on my other sprint pcs phones. Sidetone! This is the subtle audible feature where you hear a very small amount of your voice coming in through your own earpiece. So many modern phones lack this and create the unpopular "cell yell" because you can’t hear the volume of your own voice. I've scoured the web on this issue and found that the common answer from the product engineers is that they want to focus on the clarity of the caller's voice that you're listening to. Umm. The quality of the person talking while you are talking? Doesn’t make sense. Double dumb-a** on them. Sidetone MAKES or BREAKS a phone for me. This phone has it. Therefore despite the faults of the design I give the phone a huge A rating.

Bottom Line:

A few questionable design decisions, resulting in a somewhat fragile feel to the phone overall. Extremely slow menus, but this is made up in the good navigation and excellent web features. Bluetooth possibilities are the cat's meow. This phone as a PHONE for talking on, is excellent. So it is a gadgety phone, that finally, is an excellent phone. This phone is keeping me with Sprint for the forseeable future. It is that good.

Juniorhawk