PCS Phone Audiovox PPC-6700 (Sprint)

PCS Phone Audiovox PPC-6700 (Sprint) Sprint Date: na   —   $599.99   —   Electronics product page Rating:

I recently purchased a Sprint PPC-6700 and I've been experimenting with it over the past couple of days. Unlike a lot of reviews that I've seen, I actually used this phone before I wrote a review on it. For example, of the 15 different reviews I have read of this phone, not a single person has mentioned that there is a ROM download that you can get from Sprint, 43MB, that fixes virtually every complaint about the phone from other reviewers, such as:

• The volume of the speaker is drastically increased
• There is a new voice dial configuration option that you can use without buying any additional software
• The communication manager has been radically improved, showing every kind of link you can manage on the same screen
• Contacts list seems a bit more improved
• The phone is a lot faster - transitions to/from landscape are snappier and everything seems to move a lot quicker.
• The modem functionality now works in fallback mode. When the modem is on, it will provide a bluetooth modem if that's available, and will fall back to a USB modem if a bluetooth handshake isn't available.

So, this review is based on the phone as it handles, after you upgrade the ROM. I don't know if a similar ROM upgrade is available for Verizon customers of the Verizon equivalent phone - but I would think it would be available - the upgrade is from Apache, the underlying vendor that supplies to both Verizon and Sprint :)

My biggest concern about the phone was one-handed dialing. At the moment, one-handed dialing is a breeze with the little joystick so long as you're dialing a contact - which for me, is 99% of the time. The PDA functionality in this is as to be expected with Windows Mobile 5.0 - I keep trying to find iTask to shut down all my tasks before I hit the power button on the phone... its going to take me a long time to get used to that , or I'll just download a task-killing power toy :) The screen resolution is excellent, and its much taller than equivalent phones that don't have hideaway keyboards (e.g. the Motorola Q).

With the improved speaker functionality from the new ROM upgrade, I can now fully annoy anyone on the train with my ringtone - which, as we all know, is the real reason we have customized ringtones. Noises and other tactile responses from the phone are much more noticeable than before the ROM upgrade, and I can actually hear MSNBC news video when its a couple feet from my face looking at the screen. By the way, switching Windows Media Player into full-screen mode and watching full-screen video in wide is an awe-inspiring experience.

So, its a heckofa PDA, and its a really good phone. The real highlight of this phone is connectivity. With this phone, you get:

• Infrared
• Bluetooth
• EVDO high-speed broadband on the phone
• Phone can act as USB or Bluetooth Modem to linked PC/laptop

So far, the only real downsides to this phone that I've found is that its hard to avoid mashing my sausage-sized thumb onto the screen (though my sausage-fingers have absolutely no trouble typing quickly and accurately with the slide-out keyboard) and the wired stereo headphones that come with it aren't the best for making calls on the go. Both problems can be easily solved:

1. Buy some Bluetooth Headphones
2. Buy some screen protectors

The bottom line : If you're in an EVDO-enabled coverage area and you have either Sprint or Verizon (currently the only two providers with this phone and EVDO support), then you owe it to yourself to buy this phone.

Oh, and the camera works pretty well, too. Click here for a previous article I wrote that contains photos from the PPC 6700's camera.

tags: phone  sprint  ppc  6700  cellular  pda  bluetooth  evdo  review  verizon  

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