As a longtime (former) SERO customer I’m going to absorb a rare position criticising Sprint’s gift to customers and play Luxury’s Advocate here.
Every single smartphone available to SERO (and Verizon) customers is a high-end shortcoming that isn’t worth consumers’ time of day in 2008. By hooking up with SERO you’re getting a magnificent deal on your plan, you’re getting access to the best 3G data network in the United States, you’re guaranteed to be getting a bunch of non-tech-savvy friends asking you how to get the same deal… and you’re getting to choose from an embarassing selection of smartphones, the most “current” of which have been obsolete and irrelevant for over a year now. I’m going to run down the five smartphones that can be used with Sprint’s $30/month SERO plan as of this writing (Treo 700wx excluded, as it’s irrelevant even for Sprint customers), and I’m going to tell you why you don’t want any of them.
- The Palm Treo 755p is probably Sprint’s most “reasonable” option, but it’s as large physically as a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and runs a six year old operating system that gets red-headed stepchild quality “ports” of some popular smartphone applications and completely ignored for others. The badly-aging Palm/Garnet OS is not only a visual borefest, but it doesn’t allow for multitasking (pTunes excepted) when you’re actually using that limited library of programs. Want to leave your web browser running in the background while you fire up Google Maps to get directions? Not gonna happen! Palm rounds out this impressively lackluster package by delivering a subpar Java experience to keep the critically-acclaimed Opera Mini from running as well as it does on basic “free with contract” phones. How delightfully modern!
- Next up is HTC Titan/Mogul which looks great on paper, but is a nightmare “as a phone” (I know you’ve heard this before, but it’s an accurate descriptor) for day to day use. Many of the present-day features you’d expect from a $550 smartphone’s operating system (threaded text messaging, a touch-friendly contact manager, Bluetooth performance tweaks, a touch-friendly dialer, GPS, an aesthetically pleasing appearance, and much more) have to be handled by hacky third-party applications (or hardware) that fight with one another and — believe it or not — actually cause the phone to crash, thanks to the volatile-at-best Windows Mobile platform and poor driver support from HTC. The Titan includes an unmistakably “smells like 2006 in here” bonus of only packing 64MB RAM (25MB free when the device boots, much less after it spends all day leaking memory) and receiving infrequent and buggy (yet desperately needed) firmware updates from its couldn’t-care-less keepers, HTC and Sprint. If you’re willing to make a serious time commitment to the Titan, it can be bullied into a state of being a fairly usable (though by no means magnificent) device complete with a hardware keyboard, a touchscreen, and a reasonably palatable form-factor. For these reasons, it’s probably got the most potential of any smartphone offered up on SERO.
- HTC Vogue/Touch sits in a confusing position: it’s fundamentally a Titan with the physical QWERTY keyboard lopped off, WiFi removed, and the internal program RAM mercifully doubled. I’d love to recommend this device because of its diminuitive physical size, but the fact is that it’s designed to appeal to a market that likely won’t be thrilled to get its hands dirty with Windows Mobile. Add in a camera that’s somehow worse than the already-abysmal CDMA norm, a poorly realized touchscreen-only text input mechanism, and the entire form factor’s pathetic desire to look like something it couldn’t be further from and you have another reasonable but less-than-stellar offering.
- Following these three class acts is Sprint’s joke of a 2008 marketing centerpiece, the Palm Centro. It brings SERO customers the same internal hardware and embarassingly out of date operating system as the Treo 755p, but with the added flair of a more reasonable price tag and a physical size reduction. While smaller than a Treo, Palm’s Centro is still an uncomfortable 18.5mm thick: the same thickness as HTC Titan/Mogul with its spacious sliding QWERTY keyboard (compared to Centro’s horrifically cramped tic-tac style keypad), and 1.2mm thicker than Nokia’s crazy-hot five-megapixel camera with autofocus, xenon flash, and VGA video recording N82 smartphone (compared to Centro’s ancient 1.3 megapixel shooter). What is Palm burying amidst all that bulk? It’s sure not an improved processor, GPS, or a newer camera lens! By now, we can only assume that Palm is brilliantly employing their fleet of Centros and Treo 755s as vessels to traffic new and exciting drugs that will make them filthy rich by way of unsuspecting SERO customers’ so-called “smartphones.”
- The last inadequate option is delivered as two separate SKUs: they’re sneakily dressed in different outfits but they’re fundamentally the same device, Motorola Q and Motorola MOTO Q9c. Moto already isn’t well-known for putting out top-quality products, and the uncomfortably high failure rates of the Moto Q absolutely supports this. Sold as the original “oh-goodness-it’s-so-thin-I-might-pee” touchscreenless CDMA smartphone, I harbor high distaste for the device on the simple grounds of its trashy operating system. Both of the Qs run Windows Mobile “Standard” (the artist formerly known as ‘WinMo Smartphone’), which comes across as a badly neutered version of the full Windows Mobile experience at best, and a foul imitator of Nokia’s touchscreen-free (yet still fabulous) S60 operating system at worst. A quick look at a side-by-side comparison of the two phones shows that they’re freakishly similar: they both sport the same tired 312 MHz Intel XScale processor that could barely handle Windows Mobile 5 the first time around (let alone WM6), they both pack a meager 64MB of RAM, and they both have the same embarassing 1.3 megapixel camera we’ve come to ignore over the years.
- If the Q9c is a sequel, what did Motorola bring to the party for Act II (or more accurately, Act 1.01)? Not too much. They added assisted GPS that suffers from slow performance, a thicker battery that still struggles to make it through a 24-hour stretch, and bumped up the Bluetooth radio and memory cardslot to present-day market standards. Knowing their customers craved a Windows Mobile 6 update, Motorola capitalized on the Q’s relative commercial success and battery life shortcomings by simply re-releasing that phone as the Q9c, now more sluggish than ever thanks to the incremental OS update. Meanwhile, owners of the first Q are still clamoring away for a WM6 firmware upgrade that’s never going to happen thanks to Q9c’s existence, and you’ve got the 411 on why neither of these phones are worth owning in 2008 unless you don’t mind laggy navigation, the worst smartphone OS available (victimized by having a much smaller library of programs than its big brother, WM Professional), and crappy battery life all in the name of owning something that looks “sorta like a BlackBerry.”
And what of the BlackBerrys? Tragically, none of RIM’s BlackBerrys available with Sprint will work with the $30/month SERO plan, as they require a more expensive data option. We like to call it The RIMjob Tax, but you can call it whatever you like — just remember, it adds up to no BlackBerry love for the SERO crew.
If I sound like I’m a SERO-hater, you’ve gotten the wrong idea: that’s not the bone I’m trying to pick here. While I’m a firm believer that a standard-issue Sprint service plan is every bit the same failure as the horsecrap offered up with a smile by our boys over at VZ-dub, you really want to look closely and try to find something to like when the getting is this good. The issue is that they’ve made it really hard to do so: perhaps that’s part of why a $30/month plan with scads of minutes and unlimited 3G data and text exists, and perhaps that’s part of why Sprint is doing as poorly financially as they are right now. Every single device masquerading as a “high-end smartphone” in the SERO portfolio comes over as a lackluster “port” of a better device available to GSM customers. Titan/Mogul is in every way inferior to HTC Kaiser/Tilt; the Qs are like bastard cousins of BlackBerry Curve, Nokia E61i, and maybe even HTC Excalibur/Dash; HTC Vogue/Touch means well but still just isn’t an iPhone; and Palm’s offerings have been irrelevant since before their conception.
It’s like… have you ever seen an intense blockbuster film on opening weekend with a full house, only to find a straight-to-DVD remake of the same production starring cheap actors and sitting in retail bargain bins a year later?
Yeah, it’s kinda like that.
- Jan 26, 07:34 AM
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1 · Mark Larson · Jan 28, 01:34 AM
Let me run over all the points with you... I've been on SERO about as long as you, and a better deal simply does not exists... however if you have the money for an N82 or N95, you probably are free to pay a lot more on any of the other carriers.
The Q9c works great. It is marginally slower than the Q and a lot thicker and heavier, but it includes full GPS (not crippled GPS) which can also make use of Sprint's network with the A-GPS hack. I have GPS service all the time, even where I have no Sprint network. Not like my dumbphones which only have GPS when there is Sprint service.
The Mogul ROM issue has been botched from the beginning. That is why I'm switching to the Touch, but am going to think about selling the Touch if the Mogul is the only one to get the GPS and Rev A.
The Centro is a great phone, but the price is meh. I got my Q for $100 as well, that was last year. The Centro doesn't really offer anything more than the Q, but its made the Q9c more expensive. My girlfriend would not consider owning the Q, but the Centro was an easy sell.
In short, concentrate on the positives. I was with T-Mobile, had a great plan and everything, but goddamn if the phone selection didn't suck, and unlocked phones were too expensive. For the price of an N82 or K850i I could literally buy a free phone and a Canon DSLR. A DSLR. Those hyped new phones are that expensive.
The only pertinent improvement the Kaiser offers over the Mogul with the new ROM is a better camera and more memory. For a lot more money, both to use it and to buy it. I hope the Mogul is refreshed soon, with more memory. I would like a sliding keyboard.