Pocket PC Phone May Leave You Squinting

Sprint Nextel's PCS Vision Smart Device PPC-6700 has promise, but its keyboard suffers from poor legibility due to problematic backlighting.

I want a mobile phone that thinks it's a tiny PC--so I was intrigued by Sprint's PCS Vision Smart Device PPC-6700, the first phone equipped with Windows Mobile 5.0.

The PDA phone, which runs on Sprint's CDMA network, includes a landscape-oriented keyboard that's far wider and more notebooklike than BlackBerry-style microkeyboards. When you slide the keyboard out, the screen automatically flips to landscape mode, and the bundled mobile editions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint gracefully accommodate documents of desktop origin.

The PPC-6700's bricklike design looks bulky, but it's about the same pocketable size as a Palm Treo 650. And my shipping unit packed lots of features, including a 1.3-megapixel camera that takes passable photos, a MiniSD slot for extra memory, Bluetooth, and support for Sprint's EvDO wireless broadband. (Sprint is just rolling out EvDO; for now, you're likelier to get online by using Sprint's 1XRTT network or the unit's built-in Wi-Fi connection.)

The keyboard supported quick and accurate typing some of the time--but backlighting was a problem. In theory, light shining through the characters makes typing easier in dim light. In reality, the see-through characters were usually hard to read, and almost illegible in some cases.

Bottom Line: The PPC-6700 gets a guarded recommendation, but a successor model that fixed the keyboard flaw would be a winner.

Harry McCracken