The more dainty of Sprint's newest Direct Connect phones, the Sanyo Pro 200 has a wealth of features. Will it help revive the Nextel network?
Review summary of the Sanyo Pro 200:
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 The Sanyo Pro 200 (and its rugged sibling) could redefine the Direct Connect market, if enough potential customers find themselves within the coverage area. The interface and feature set blow away previous Nextel phones, and we were just as happy with the phone's battery life and voice quality, so long as we had plenty of bars of reception. GPS is a great idea for Direct Connect customers, and the messaging features were surprisingly robust. We're not sure we'd pick the Sanyo Pro 200 over the rugged, military-spec Sanyo Pro 700, which doesn't cost much more, but even by itself the Pro 200 makes a great addition to the Direct Connect lineup. Release: June 2008. Price: $100.
Pros: Nice feature set for a Direct Connect phone. Pretty interface on a bright, colorful screen. Navigation worked well.
Cons: Call quality suffered in bad reception. Direct Connect drops out altogether without EV-DO Rev. A coverage. Phone is kind of ugly, too.
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Full review of the Sanyo Pro 200:
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Design and Interface - Good
Sanyo makes two types of phones: sleek, underpowered phones like the Sanyo S1; or unattractive, well-built utility phones like the Sanyo M1. We prefer the latter by far, and, thankfully, the Sanyo Pro 200 falls into this category. It's a boxy phone, with some exposed screws and a very thick body, but it also has a nice, solid feel to it. We were pleasantly surprised the first time we opened it up to find the bright, colorful screen and polished-looking interface.
Nextel Direct Connect phones have long been the blue collar cousin of Sprint's Power Vision lineup, but things have changed dramatically now that Sprint is running their Push-to-Talk service on Qualcomm's Qchat technology, which runs on Sprint's super-fast EV-DO Rev. A network. The Sanyo Pro 200 looks and feels more like a modern phone, with an interface that is leaps and bounds ahead of any Direct Connect phone we've seen in the past. It still doesn't look nearly as good as a contemporary multimedia phone, but these walkie-talkie phones are catching up quickly.
Calling - Good
With its Direct Connect walkie-talkie features, the Sanyo Pro 200 is made for talking. The speakerphone is very loud. We had little trouble having a conversation while driving on the highway with our windows rolled down. Unfortunately, voice quality and reception were something of an issue, which can also affect the phone's features. In New York City, we got a solid 3-4 bars of reception on the phone, and calls sounded nice and clear. Direct Connect connections also went through without a hitch. As we moved west, into the suburbs, our reception dropped precipitously. We were usually still under EV-DO Rev. A coverage in Morristown, New Jersey, a large suburban town, but when EV-DO dropped out, so did Direct Connect. For that matter, even plain old voice calls had static issues and significant dropout problems when reception dipped to its lowest point.
For calling features, the phone has a good-looking address book with just enough fields to keep us satisfied. Not enough for business power-users, but it was easy to create groups and party calls over the Direct Connect network. You can assign voice tags for dialing, which is nice, but we always prefer speaker-independent voice dialing. The phone's Bluetooth had no trouble connecting to a variety of devices. Battery life was very impressive. We managed a single call that lasted more than six hours, which even beats Sanyo's five hour estimate.
Messaging - Good
For a phone so focused on push-to-talk, we were truly impressed by the wealth of messaging options available on the Sanyo Pro 200. Don't get us wrong, this isn't the Sprint Mogul we're dealing with, but the phone does come loaded with options for most of our favorite instant messaging and e-mail clients, including Gmail. The actual messaging clients were nothing special, but having these options on a walkie-talkie phone is, so far, a bonus.
The Sanyo Pro 200 and the Sanyo Pro 700 (compare) have different keyboards, and we preferred the more rubbery keys of the Pro 700 to the more flat, polished keypad on the Pro 200, but not by much. The phone doesn't have a camera, so MMS messaging is out, but there is a dedicated "Text" button for SMS messages, another pleasant surprise.
Navigation - Very good
The Sanyo Pro 200 has a GPS sensor tied to Sprint Navigator for driving directions, and we were impressed with how quickly the sensor found us, even hiding in our office cubicles. The faster networking speeds also meant that maps loaded very quickly, and the entire experience was very good. GPS should be a useful feature for the Direct Connect audience, and we're happy to see the hardware is able to keep us.
Web browsing - Mediocre
The Sanyo Pro 200 uses the Access NetFront browser, a very basic-looking WAP browser. Pages were crammed onto the mobile screen and layout was out of sorts, but the Web experience was still usable in a pinch. The phone will accept the Opera Mini browser, which is much better, but you'll have to get it on your own. At the very least, the phone seems to benefit from the faster networking speeds, and even image-heavy pages like our homepage loaded quickly.
Price and availability
The Sanyo Pro 200 is available now from Sprint for $100 with a two-year contract agreement. A $50 mail-in rebate is available when signing up for a qualifying plan.
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