STi Mobile Will Have Renyo Vi-2300

This phone doesn't have a camera or some other whizbang feature in that direction, but it has Sprint's walkie-talkie service, ReadyLink. And yes, STi will be supporting that feature when the phone comes out, which will be around January 24th, or so the STi rep told me Wednesday. Granted, ReadyLink isn't Nextel as far as connection speeds go, though Nextel seems oddly enough to be going slower lately for the initial connection time, but it is definately a walkie-talkie service with the added benefit of the phone's normal number being its walkie number so you don't have to remember an arcane series of digits and stars. Oh, and ReadyLink is a whole lot cheaper than Direct Connect, at 79 cents a day (whether you use it or not but you can always have it enabled or disabled) for both ReadyLink and web access. So the effective cost of ReadyLink is 60 cents a day, 40% of the cost of Direct Connect on Boost Mobile.

Small problem: not too many people are on ReadyLink while everyone with a Nextel or Boost phone has Direct Connect. But the cheapness of ReadyLink on STi will probably convince a few people to move over. Granted, the Sanyo VI-2300 isn't small, but its speakerphone looks big and "bad" and the phone appears to be well-built (and it's still not as big as a Nextel i730) so I don't think anyone is going to mind too much about the size.

In short, at the end of January STi is coming out with ReadyLink...woohoo!