Yup, it's a nice phone. You've got the N400, right?Originally Posted by bahn
The A500 has:
- Mono, polyphonic and PCM (.wav-type via .qcp format) ringtones
- Web access
- Voice memos
- Standard call history/phone book menus
- Phone book groups (aka Family, Friends, Colleagues, etc.)
- Individual ringtones for each group or phone book entry
- SMS (Sprint calls them "notifications" -- there's also no way to send them directly from the phone without going on the web or download an application)
- J2ME framework, which allows Java-based applications to be run - this is basically what the games and other stuff run on
- Picture capability -- using the camera accessory, you can store pictures on the phone and on the web-based album
- Animated screensavers
- Planner/PDA functions: events, task list, calendar, alarms, memo pad, calculator, world time and countdown timer
- Airplane mode: shuts off the phone network features while on an airplane, so you can still do PDA or application stuff (read: games) while flying
This might repeat some of what Korly posted a while back in the thread he linked, but here are my impressions of the gadget so far.
I got this about a week ago. Sprint put me on their free Vision trial, so I get web access for a couple of months. It's not anything special -- while the phone can download pages quickly, it appears to take time since the lag created by finding the server and negotiating a connection creates latency that slows things down. Sprint's website sucks (and I take offense to the idea of paying them for something I already pay them for), so I pretty quickly found a whole community of Sprint 3G users that have posted free content on the web.
Anyone with a 3G phone should check out http://www.sprintusers.com. There's a lot of information on that site about Sprint PCS in general, and Vision in particular. Vision users can even upload items to thier phone via their "Focus" utility -- it sends a SMS text message to your phone, which you can then extract a URL from and go on the web to download the content. There are links to numerous sites that offer content in the same fashion. Non-Sprint users should still be able to download content, as long as their phone is based on the J2ME platform.
Just as an example, so far I've gotten Pac-man, red alert klaxon (from Star Trek), Zelda and Trogdor (PCM, so it's the song with Strong Bad's lyrics, not just midi) ringtones. I found a Pac-man clone to download as well. There's a Street Fighter clone somewhere, but I've not found it yet. The phone actually came with Space Invaders, Monkey Ball and some lame racing game. Game playing is pretty cool on such a small device, but the control is a bit awkward -- it's a phone first, not a Gameboy. There is a gamepad for this phone, but I don't imagine that I'll buy it.
The A500 is last year's big thing. I picked it up because Best Buy had it on special. The $130 phone was brought down to $65 after rebate for a 1-year plan, could have been $30 after rebate for a 2-year plan; but this is my first phone and I don't care to get into something that might go downhill before the two years are up. If you want to get into something like this, checkout some of the phones Wildkat posted or look at the Samsung A600 (it seems to be the upgrade to the A500).
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