Review: UTStarComm CDM7000 and Movida Unlimited Service

Here's the phone review that catches me up to what I said I'd do awhile ago...now to put all these reviews into a dedicated reviews section on the site...ah well...but anyway...

First I'll start with a review of Movida's Unlimited service. As everyone probably knows already, Movida runs off of Sprint PCS and doesn't have the hottest rates in town for its normal plans, but has an interesting twist to the "hybrid" plans that nobody else that I know of as far as Sprint hybrids go is doing: rollover minutes.

Okay, that's not such a huge deal but when everyone else isn't doing it the fact that Movida is sets it apart from the crowd. So basically as long was you keep your expiration up to date, which costs at least $30 a month and includes unlimited nights and weekends starting at 9, you can use that $30 on 25-cent anytime minutes or 10-cent text messages whenever you want. Which is sorta neat. As an added bonus, if you spend $50 a month the rate drops to 20 cents a minute. Of course, that's still not a great rate, but they're pretty much giving you the UTStarComm 7000\7025 (I'm reviewing the 7000 hrere, the 7025 is similar but I'll talk about it soon) with a month of service so things aren't quite so bad.

But I have a few nits to pick about the service, whose phones come preprogrammed to "habla Espanol" (which is fine; I could change the language setting relatively easily). First off, it's a bit expensive for what you get minute-wise, but then again it seems like all Sprint-based hybrids are that way. Second, all shortcode SMS doesn't work on Movida...no Facebook texts for me :(. Third, free weekends are nice but I honestly don't talk to anyone much after 9 p.m. on the phone and don't particularly want to have to change my calling habits to get enough out of the service to justify the extra cost of this feature. Then again, some people do all of their talking after 9 p.m. but I simply don't do much talking at any part of the day, and most of the time it is during the day. Last, customer service takes a long time to come online, or at least they did when I activated the phone about a month ago...which is of course annoying...

Okay, that was the service. Now to the phone...

Which was surprisingly good for how people had reviewed it over on PhoneScoop. Signal-wise I have no complaints, though I was surprised when I idly unscrewed the antenna and it could suddenly be lifted out of its socket...guess that's just for the capability of having bigger antennas...

But reception, as said, was good. Battery life wasn't as good, averaging to my reckoning about three days of light usage on a charge, but the battery life isn't horrible either. Though I can't figure out why the life is so low when the phone doesn't have an external screen...maybe it's the flashing UTSTarComm logo on the front...

Inside the phone, you find something that reminds you of gram'ma: a pixelated, small screen with a user interface that isn't so hot. But you also find a fairly large keypad that's abundant in tactile feedback, good for text messaging despite the fact that the screen is small resolution-wise and size-wise.

The phone isn't particularly beautiful (like the Nokia 2366i for example) but it isn't horribly ugly either. It's also on the thin side...sort of...and has a loud speakerphone, though the handset volume without the speakerphone isn't so loud...yeah I'm being random here but I'm just talking about odds and ends...

And of course you get polyphonic ringtones, as well as hybrid polyphonic\PureVoice (lo-fi real audio) ringers, plus if I remember correctly a PureVoice-only ringer or two. Which is interesting, but that's about it.

And that pretty much sums up the phone and service. Both work, both are cheap to start out with through prepaidWireless.com, who lent me this phone for review, but neither have any particularly noteworthy features that render them a "must buy" combo.