Sprint Katana II

Sprint seems to have designed its Katana II to attract admirers of Motorola's sleek Razr who also want GPS features in their cell phone. Unfortunately, though affordably priced at $100 (with a two-year contract), this Sanyo phone proved a lot less convenient to use as a navigation aid than I had hoped.

Petite and lightweight (3.3 ounces), the Katana II scores high on looks--especially the Pink Fascination version I tested. But otherwise, it's about what you'd expect from an inexpensive flip phone. Voice quality was adequate; the VGA (640 by 480) camera took okay photos; and the battery lasted about 4 hours in our talk-time tests.

The inclusion of an embedded GPS is unusual at this price point, but to use it you must download Sprint's implementation of Telnav's GPS software and pay a subscription fee of $10 a month or $3 a day. I found the service often unpleasant to use.

Telnav downloads search results and routes them to your phone as needed, which eases the computing and power demands on the phone. However, you frequently have to wait for data (on Sprint's sluggish 1xRTT Vision network) to finish downloading. Also, you have to turn on the speaker manually to enable voice directions; I wish that this setting had been automated.

In one case, the GPS technology took several minutes to figure out where I was in downtown San Francisco--and then it provided meaningless directions anyway. The GPS application wasn't always off track, but if you need reliable navigation help, get a more expensive and capable handset such as a Palm Treo or a Windows Mobile device outfitted with embedded or add-on GPS features.