Sunday, October 30, 2005

STi Phone Fun

Since I can never seem to be able to write that big STi post that I want to do, I have decided to split my info gleaned from STi Customer Service reps into two portions, one about phones and one about services that will be released on or about November 1st. I have already told about the Sanyo 200 and Samsung n400 (the latter of which is only sold in stores) so I won't re-discuss them here. I'll also put in a word or two about two phones that aren't exactly new to STi but have not been discussed here or have changed a little since the previous discussion.


Audiovox 8912

Yes, this is the famed-of-Virgin-Mobile Flasher camera phone. I don't know what the pricing will be but it will support web access and picture messaging, as well as text messaging of course. All without that obnoxiously high Virgin Mobile rate structure and obnoxiously wierd teeny-bopper theme. Granted, in my opinion Audiovoxes aren't the greatest phones in the world but I'm glad to see another camera phone coming to STi.


Sanyo 2300

Yes, STi is getting a Ready Link phone. Now to see whether they will offer Ready Link any time soon, and for a reasonable price. For that matter, will they offer the phone at a reasonable price? I don't know, but this phone would be the third most advanced STi phone on the market, next to the camera phones of course. If you want walkie-talkie service though this might be the phone that brings it to prepaid other than Boost Mobile. We'll see...

Samsung a660
This would be a good basic phone if so many people didn't say it wasn't. Of course your experience may pleasantly differ and STi will probably offer this as a free phone anyway so there isn't too much risk in trying it. It has web access and such stuff, though there's no external display (I will not upgrade to this phone) but it looks OK.

OK. Now to other phones that STi sells that I haven't covered or have changed since I've covered them...

LG 225
The only thing here is that, according to one rep, it won't come out, at least not immediately, with a mail-in rebate, putting it in line with other prepaid camera phones as far as price goes (Virgin Mobile Snapper, T-Mobile To Go Nokia 6101). I think they will get the rebate back online though, and once they do the phone will be cheaper to buy than it would be direct from Sprint on a 2-year contract! :)

LG 5350
I can't figure out whether this is a basic or advanced phone, but whatever it is, it looks like a good one. Granted, it doesn't have 850 digital capability, so if you roam you'll be on analog, but then again STi doesn't really allow roaming anyway so there's no big inconvenience there, especially since because of this you can credit-card-roam off of virtually anybody. This phone supposedly doesn't have text messaging, but then again it might have text and web and all sorts of fun stuff like that.

So there you have it, the new phones that will come out on STi Mobile in probably their entirety for the next month or so! :) Discuss this in the STi forum.

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