The Verizon Wireless Salute

The Verizon Wireless Salute is a basic slider phone for the feature-phobic. It's actually manufactured by ZTE, and is the Chinese company's first phone for Verizon. Like the LG Accolade ($9.99-$199.99, 3.5 stars) and the Samsung Gusto SCH-U360 ($0-$199.99, 3 stars), the ZTE Salute gives Verizon sales reps another option when someone walks up to the retail counter and asks for a phone that's "just a phone." There's nothing terribly wrong with the Salute, especially if you really want a slider. But there are several better choices on Verizon at virtually the same price.

Design and Call Quality
The Salute measures 4.0 by 2.0 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighs four ounces. To me, the silver plastic construction feels cheap, though the blue LED around the circular control pad adds a little extra bling. Five function keys offer Send, End, Clear, and two soft keys that change function depending on the menu display. The impressive 2.4-inch LCD is a good size for a low-end device, and sports 240-by-320-pixel resolution. That's better than the 176-by-220 or even 128-by-160-pixel displays you'll find on similarly inexpensive phones. The flat, slide-out numeric keypad features rectangular plastic keys. Dialing numbers was pretty simple, though the keypad felt chintzy. At least the keys didn't wiggle around in their perches, which I've seen on some low-cost handsets.

The ZTE Salute is a dual-band 1xRTT (850/1900 MHz) device with no 3G or Wi-Fi capability. Unlike the Samsung Haven SCH-U320 ($39.99-$169.99, 2.5 stars), the Salute has Bluetooth. This way you can use it with a hands-free speakerphone, a Bluetooth-compatible car stereo, or a headset while driving. In my tests, voice quality was very good, as befits a Verizon phone. Callers sounded clear, if a little hollow, through the earpiece, and they said my voice came through just fine. Reception was average, and there was no background hiss or buzz.

Calls also sounded clear through an Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99, 4 stars) Bluetooth headset. Voice dialing worked fine over Bluetooth without training. The speakerphone sounded okay. I've heard worse; using this one outdoors should be fine as long as it's not too loud outside. Battery life was quite good at 5 hours and 48 minutes of talk time.

Apps, Multimedia, and Conclusions
The Salute offers a choice of three modestly animated home screen wallpapers and menu themes. The main menu itself contains nine icons arranged in a grid. It's pretty easy to get around using the control pad. The Settings menu has plenty of separate pages with just one choice on each, which, to me, was a bit confusing. The Networks-in-Motion-powered VZ Navigator 4.5.3 offers voice-enabled, turn-by-turn GPS directions, local search, and event listings for $9.99 per month. You can search the Web with Bing, or dive into the Polaris 6.1 browser to bring up basic mobile WAP pages. I'd suggest avoiding Verizon's extra-cost pair of e-mail clients, as this isn't a QWERTY device.

The 1.3-megapixel camera lacks a flash or auto-focus capability. Test photos were a bit bright and overexposed, but they'll suffice for throwaway shots. There's no music player, no video player, and no camcorder. The non-standard size 2.5mm headphone jack is at least semi-common for mono wired ear buds, which is all the Salute supports anyway. The media section is mostly for stored pictures, ringtones, and games. Verizon gives you 25 ringtones to get started, and VZW Tones Deluxe offers an on-board portal that soaks up extra megabyte charges if you don't have a data plan. You'll need to cram everything into 36MB of free internal memory, since there's no microSD card slot or device sync capability. You can share photos online or send them in picture messages, but e-mailing them isn't an option.

All told, the Salute is just okay, and not particularly exciting. Alternate options: the Samsung Haven SCH-U320 ($39.99-$169.99, 2.5 stars) is a flip phone that's aimed squarely at older consumers, with its big keys, big fonts, and useful lifestyle and emergency call focus, but it drops the Bluetooth and camera, which, to us, borders on unacceptable. If anything, go with the LG Accolade, which feels well-built and offers solid voice quality and excellent battery life. Your best bet for a low-cost Verizon feature phone remains the Samsung Intensity 2 SCH-U460 ($0-$199, 3 stars), which also skirts Verizon's irksome data plan requirement, but adds a very usable QWERTY keyboard and better social media connections.

The HTC Desire ($199 direct)

The HTC Desire ($199 direct) is US Cellular's best cell phone. It's about as powerful as the HTC Droid Incredible ($299.99, 4.5 stars) on Verizon, but it's cheaper to own. The Desire is also similar to the unlocked (and now discontinued) Google Nexus One, but in some ways, the Desire is even better. HTC's slick Sense UI, combined with the Desire's beautiful screen and fast processor, make this handset our new Editors' Choice for US Cellular smartphones.

Design and Call Quality
The HTC Desire measures 4.7 by 2.4 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.8 ounces. The soft touch housing is a mixture of black and dark grey, and looks a bit rounder than the Incredible's. The Desire feels expensive, and it's comfortable to hold for long periods. The striking 3.7-inch glass capacitive touch screen features 480-by-800-pixel resolution, and supports multi-touch gestures like pinch-to-zoom. An optical sensor replaces the Nexus One's mechanical trackball. It was a little fiddly in operation, but you won't need it often, thanks to the touch screen.
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HTC Desire (US Cellular) : Front
HTC Desire (US Cellular) : Angle
HTC Desire (US Cellular) : Trackpad
HTC Desire (US Cellular) : Right

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The HTC Desire is a dual-band EV-DO Rev. A (850/1900 MHz) device with 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. The nation's sixth-largest carrier, US Cellular offers service in 26 states, but roams on Verizon otherwise; be sure to check the coverage maps before deciding on this carrier. Voice calls sounded good but not great overall. HTC has been at this a while, and it shows in the Desire's clear sound. However, the tone was a little hollow in the earpiece. One caller said there was a pronounced "speakerphone" effect that wasn't present through a Samsung Acclaim (also on US Cellular) in a back-to-back comparison. Reception was fine.

Calls sounded clear through an Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99, 4 stars) Bluetooth headset. As with many Android devices, there's no voice dialing over Bluetooth, which can be a deal-breaker for some. The speakerphone sounded harsh and tinny, but it had a decent amount of gain. Battery life was average at 5 hours and 3 minutes of talk time.

User Interface and Apps
HTC Sense, the company's unified interface and application layer, makes another appearance on the Desire. The home screen features HTC's trademark large rolodex-style clock and animated weather widget, plus three soft keys on the screen above the touchpad. It allows for seven customizable home screens with preview thumbnails, and includes numerous full-screen information panels and other widgets. As with other recent HTC devices, I found Sense to be attractive, fast, and easy to use.

Underneath the Sense UI layer is Android 2.1. That means you can choose from over 70,000 apps in Android Market, and you'll likely run into fewer compatibility issues than on a handset with the older Android 1.6. HTC includes Friend Stream, which aggregates Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr updates. It also groups contacts and combines your Facebook and Google address books. The Web browser did a fabulous job with desktop HTML pages. Unlike a nearby Samsung Captivate ($199, 4 stars), the Desire's browser didn't have redundant brightness settings and zoom controls, so the browser worked exactly as expected.

Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
This is a stellar multimedia device, with one exception, which I'll get out of the way quickly: the microSD card slot is buried beneath the battery cover, and you have to pull the battery to swap cards. HTC throws in an 8GB card, and my 16GB SanDisk card worked fine; there's also 117MB of available internal storage. Here I'll recommend DoubleTwist (Free, 4 stars) for syncing music files and iTunes playlists with PCs or Macs, since swapping microSD cards isn't practical with this handset.

Music tracks sounded clear and full over Motorola S9-HD ($129, 3.5 stars) Bluetooth headphones. The standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack makes finding third-party wired ear buds easy; HTC tosses in a thin-sounding pair to get you started. The music player was easy to navigate and displayed medium-sized album art thumbnails. Standalone MP4, 3GP, WMV, and even 720p HD videos looked stunning on the Incredible's screen in full screen mode. Oddly, the video player itself is tucked inside the photo gallery, and doesn't get an icon of its own.

The 5-megapixel auto-focus camera includes an LED flash, face detection, and geotagging. This is reduced slightly from the HTC Incredible's 8-megapixel sensor. But in the real world, camera phones' optics matter more than megapixels. The Desire took sharp, colorful pictures both indoors and out, with no perceptible shutter lag or save times. Indoor shots with modest lighting were noisier but still usable, though the focus was a bit softer. The camcorder recorded slightly dark 1280-by-720-pixel videos that averaged 17 frames per second. But the real-time frame rate jumped around a lot at this resolution, and seemed to depend on the lighting conditions.

All told, if you're buying a smartphone and U.S. Cellular's coverage maps work for you, the HTC Desire is the phone to get. If you'd rather save another $120 up front, the Samsung Acclaim is a worthy second-tier option. It's slower, has a smaller screen, a poorer camera, and loses the HTC Sense UI. But it adds a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, has better battery life, and sounds a bit better on voice calls. Still, we'd save up the extra $120 for the Desire; it's that good.

The Sanyo Zio is one of the least expensive Android cell phones in America

The Sanyo Zio is one of the least expensive Android cell phones in America. But you're getting what you pay for here, with an old version of the OS that's missing key features, plenty of bugs, and a slow processor that has trouble dragging along some of the phone's higher-end elements.

Still, I don't want to minimize its main strength: The phone itself will run you between $229 and $249, but Cricket's plan means you'll only pay $55 per month for service with unlimited voice calls, text messages and 2GB of data—that even includes tax. That's at least $20 less per month than any other 3G Android phone out there. Over two years, that adds up to a lot of savings.
Physical Features
The 3.7-ounce Zio is a slim, rounded slab-style phone; it measures 4.6 by 2.3 by .5 inches (HWD), and is made of black and silver plastic with a soft-touch back. It feels fine except for the slick, almost-greasy-feeling 3.5-inch, 800-by-480-pixel plastic touch screen, which is responsive but just feels less pleasant to the touch than more expensive screens. The thick plastic covering over the screen also makes it appear dim.
Specifications

Service Provider
Cricket
Operating System
Android OS
Screen Size
3.5 inches
Screen Details
800-by-480, 262k-color TFT LCD capacitive touch screen
Camera
Yes
Network
CDMA
Bands
850, 1900, 1700
High-Speed Data
1xRTT, EVDO Rev A
Processor Speed
600 MHz

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In my tests, the Zio's reception wasn't great, matching the Cricket MSGM8 II in a weak-signal area, but unable to complete a call where the excellent BlackBerry Curve 8530 had no problems. It also isn't a great voice phone. The earpiece and speakerphone are both loud enough, but calls in the earpiece had a wobbly, thready quality and the speakerphone sounded harsh in my tests. Transmissions did a good job of muting background noise, although they were a bit muddy and scratchy. My calls were also plagued by a proximity sensor bug which prevented the screen from lighting up when I pulled the phone away from my face. The relatively accurate Nuance voice dialing worked with a Bluetooth headset, which is very unusual for an Android phone. Battery life, at 4 hours 5 minutes of talk time, is acceptable but on the low side.

Apps, Software and Multimedia Features
The Zio's stock Android 1.6 OS feels, nowadays, like something that's been pulled out of the dollar bin at a thrift store. It's inexcusable. While other manufacturers are also doing older versions of Android, they try to smooth them over a bit with social-networking widgets or Microsoft Exchange clients. Not here—there's no Microsoft Exchange support at all, no pinch-to-zoom, some annoying issues with keyboard accuracy and several bugs, including one which asked me to enter my Google ID over and over again. Cricket has added its own app store as an option beyond the Android Market, but it's a mess: poorly populated and with tiny little thumbnail previews of apps. Furthermore, a growing number of Android Market apps won't be compatible with Android 1.6 as time goes on. On the bright side, Kyocera says it will upgrade this phone to Android 2.1 soon.

I was encouraged by the inclusion of FutureDial's PC software for syncing the phone's contacts, calendar, and media with Microsoft Outlook, but that's also buggy. I couldn't get the software to successfully connect to the phone on a Windows 7 PC.

The combination of a 600-Mhz Qualcomm MSM7627, ARM11 processor and an 800-by-480 screen makes for sluggish performance. The Zio performed similarly to other lower-end Android phones like the T-Mobile MyTouch 3G Slide ($179.99-$429.99, ) and Motorola Devour (Free-$79.99 with contract, ) on most benchmarks. But graphics performance, in terms of time it took to draw the screen, was the worst I've ever seen on any Android phone. That resulted in jerky game play in apps like the included Midnight Bowling demo.

Music and video playback are limited but manageable. There's 131 MB of free on-board memory, and the phone comes with a 1GB MicroSD card tucked into a slot in the side; our 16GB Kingston card worked just fine. The phone plays many different music formats including AAC, MP3, WMA, and OGG, but had trouble filing the artists of some of my music properly. The free syncing app doubleTwist () can fix that, though. MPEG4 video playback was smooth at 320x240 resolution but looked a bit compressed at 640 by 480.

The flashless 2-megapixel camera took very sharp photos both indoor and out in my tests. In low light, images had deep shadows but didn't show blur. Those images took a while to snap, though, with a 1.8-second shutter delay. The video camera ambitiously tries to shoot 640-by-480 footage, but the processor can only handle 2Mbps, one quarter of what I've seen on other phones. Outdoors that makes for slightly compressed-looking 24 frame-per-second videos, but indoors, videos are blurry, jerky, and useless.

Conclusions
The Sanyo Zio just isn't a very good Android phone. But it does many things that no other phone in Cricket's lineup can do. No other phone from the carrier has a browser this good, runs anywhere near this number of apps, or plugs so easily into Google's services.

The only other Android phone on a similar service plan right now is the Motorola i1 ($399.99, ) for Boost, which has its own problems. For one thing, it costs up to $170 more than the Zio up front. The i1 also runs on a much slower 2G network with an even-slower Android 1.5. If you're looking for a smartphone with an inexpensive monthly plan, I'd suggest considering the BlackBerry Curve 8530, which is available on MetroPCS, Cricket, and Virgin Mobile. I'm also keeping my eyes out for Cricket's upcoming Huawei M860 Android phone, which will ship with Android 2.1.

For now, I can't recommend the Zio. The upcoming Android 2.1 update may change that, as it will add everything from pinch-to-zoom and Facebook integration to better overall performance.

Compare the Sanyo Zio by Kyocera (Cricket Wireless) with several other mobile phones side by side.

BlackBerry Curve 8530 (Virgin Mobile)

There are currently nine versions of the BlackBerry Curve 8530 for sale in the US. But the ones offered by Cricket, MetroPCS and Virgin Mobile demand special scrutiny. All three carriers sell this smartphone for a very low monthly rate, with no contract. Virgin's plans are a little more expensive than Metro's and Cricket's, but Virgin's network is both 3G (which Metro isn't) and available nationwide (which Cricket isn't). This is the only smartphone available for Virgin Mobile right now, and combined with the plans we think it's a very good buy.

If you didn't know, by the way, Virgin Mobile is Sprint; it's just one of Sprint's prepaid brands. So you should expect the same coverage, call quality and speeds on Virgin Mobile as you get on ordinary Sprint phones.
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BlackBerry Curve 8530 (Virgin Mobile) : Front and Porfile
BlackBerry Curve 8530 (Virgin Mobile) : Front
BlackBerry Curve 8530 (Virgin Mobile) : Angle
BlackBerry Curve 8530 (Virgin Mobile) : Profile

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Design, Call Quality, and Plans
By this point, you know what makes the BlackBerry Curve 8530 tick. It measures 4.3 by 2.4 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.9 ounces. The Curve 8530 doesn't look exciting, but that's fine given its understated mission. The 2.4-inch, 320-by-240-pixel LCD screen looked bright and colorful, but it wasn't particularly sharp because of the low resolution. Typing on the QWERTY keyboard felt great, and I prefer the 8530's new trackpad to the unreliable old trackball, even if it's a little on the sensitive side.

The Curve 8530 is a dual-band EV-DO Rev 0 (850/1900 MHz) device. That means it hits 3G data speeds, a boon for Internet browsing, streaming radio, and other data-heavy apps. There's also an 802.11b/g radio for connecting to Wi-Fi hotspots. Voice calls sounded warm and clear, but not particularly loud, in both directions. One caller said my voice was a little choppier than usual. That's turning out to be a recurring theme with the 8530, which doesn't have quite the same top-notch RF reception as the older BlackBerry Curve 8330 (4.5 stars). It's just something to be aware of if you live in an area with marginal Sprint coverage.

Calls also sounded fine through an Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99, 4 stars) Bluetooth headset, and voice dialing worked well over Bluetooth. The speakerphone was nice and loud, as befits a BlackBerry. Battery life was disappointing at just four hours of talk time; oddly, that's more than an hour shorter than other Curve 8530 variants, even though the battery is the same size.

As always, the real draw here is Virgin Mobile's lower monthly prices. Plans range from $35 to $70 per month depending on the number of voice minutes; all include unlimited texting, e-mail, Web, and other data. None require signing two-year contracts, either.

Apps, Multimedia, and Conclusions
Virgin preinstalled dedicated Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google Maps apps. There's also a link to BlackBerry App World, which contains thousands of third-party free and paid apps. Like all BlackBerrys, the Curve 8530 supports push e-mail for up to 11 accounts, and hooks into Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. Unfortunately, your company still needs a BlackBerry Enterprise Server to sync Exchange calendar and contact info over the air; individual subscribers are stuck syncing with a cable to their PCs. The stock Web browser is OK for WAP pages, but the free alternatives Opera Mini and Bitstream Bolt are better for the full Web.

The standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack is a boon for music lovers, because it makes it simple to find aftermarket ear buds. Virgin throws in a tinny sounding pair to get you started, along with a 2GB microSD card. The card slot underneath the battery cover is relatively easy to access, and accepts 32GB cards. My 16GB SanDisk card also worked fine. Music tracks sounded clear and punchy over Motorola S9-HD ($129, 3.5 stars) headphones. The music player displayed large album art and was very easy to use. The included BlackBerry Desktop Software works with Macs and PCs, and syncs various kinds of media including iTunes playlists. Standalone MP4 and 3GP videos played smoothly in full screen mode, even at 30 frames per second.

The 2-megapixel camera has neither an auto-focus nor a flash, and it takes middling photos both indoors and out. Crank the lights or take pictures on a sunny day, and it will do in a pinch. But it fell down hard in dimmer environments, with barely legible test shots. The camcorder maxed out at 320-by-240-pixels and 15 frames per second, but did the job otherwise.

We're fans of the Curve 8530 on all carriers. But the handset makes especially good sense on Virgin Mobile, MetroPCS, and Cricket, thanks to the balance of power and reasonable monthly fees. The Curve 8530 makes less sense on AT&T and Verizon, because you might as well pay another $50 or $100 at the retail counter and get something truly high-end, like a Motorola Droid X ($199, 4.5 stars) or an Apple iPhone 4 ($199, 4.5 stars).

For now, the BlackBerry Curve 8530 is America's go-to budget smartphone. Over on the main Sprint network, you'll pay around $20 more per month, but you'll have access to top-notch smartphones with hardware keyboards like the Samsung Epic 4G ($249, 4 stars) and the budget Samsung Intercept ($99, 3 stars. The new LG Rumor Touch promises to be another good option, since it now has a dedicated Virgin Mobile version in addition to Sprint's. It's not an actual smartphone, but it offers a quality combination of touch UI and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Stay tuned for a full review of that model.

Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 4 hours 0 minutes