Sanyo Incognito Prepaid Phone (Boost Mobile)

Bottom Line: a good phone at a reasonable price if you do a lot of mobile e-mail and prefer a physical keyboard. It is as useful for e-mail as a Blackberry, at a much lower price.

I wanted a cell phone that had a large physical keyboard for writing e-mail when I am away from my computer. The Sanyo Incognito has the largest physical keyboard that I have seen on a pocket size phone and it is easy to write even a lengthy e-mail at a good speed.

I have service through Boost/Sprint and have had no problem getting a strong signal, even indoors, in the Houston, Texas area. The Boost version of the Incognito comes with a good app for texting, and it took just seconds to set up my Gmail e-mail account.

The Incognito can be used as a phone with the cover closed. It is an invisible touchscreen until you release the screen lock...then it lights up so you can dial a number. I have set mine to auto re-lock so that the phone doesn't dial numbers while sitting in my pocket...so I have to remember to release the screen lock to answer incoming calls. It also works well as a speaker phone. Open up the phone (it looks like a mini-netbook computer when opened) and you can use voice recognition to call numbers in your contact list. The speaker phone mode works well even if I am five or six feet away from the phone.

The internet browser included with the Boost version of the Incognito is very basic. It works best by setting all of your favorite websites as "Favorites". That way, you can go directly to websites instead of through the clunky browser. I also downloaded the Opera Mini 5 browser and installed it as an app. It works well with many websites, such as ESPN or Google News. Some websites connect as "mini" version formatted to fit a phone screen. Others connect as the full-zize version, and Opera lets you scan across the page and then zoom in to the section you want to read. Opera would not let me enter numbers from the Incognito. The basic Incognito browser would let me enter numbers, such as entering a password for my Amazon.com account.

Videos from YouTube work well, but the Boost Incognito will not play video at sites such as the New York Times because it can not use Adobe Flash.

You can buy a mini-SD card to transfer songs from your computer to the Incognito. It has a very basic camera without a flash. You must open the phone into its "mini-computer" configuration to use the camera and the lens is positioned where your hand is sure to get in the way. That makes the camera pretty much useless.

If your primary use for a cell phone is mobile e-mail, the Incognito is a good alternative to a Blackberry, at a much lower price.

This was our first foray into Boost Mobile space to take advantage of the very reasonable all-you-can-eat service (web, talk, text) rates. The phone was chosen because of the advertised touch surface and fold out keyboard with a full color internal screen for web and texting, pics. The experience of using the phone when closed takes a bit of a acclimation period. The numbers fade out of view after a certain time which can be perplexing on any manufacturer/utility company's support line (Press 1 for English now). The calls were clear and sounded great. The main use for the phone was texting which was a joy with this keyboard. It provides solid feedback when keying in a reply and the spacing between the keys helps for accurate input. The built in web browser and default menu choices on the phone are fine but we opted to install Opera's Mini web browser for a much faster and modern look and feel to browsing (use the directional arrows on the keypad and the two main buttons under the screen for most actions). The biggest drawback is the somewhat plastic feel of the body, we invested in a screen protector for the outside face (recommended) and internal screen. Overall a solid phone!

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I had this phone for 7 months before the charger spot quit working and the phone was useless. However that being said it is a great phone. It plays youtube videos and has an mp3 player built in. Sound is good too. For $50 a month it was great. Im buying another one to replace the broken one so its well worth the $100 or less to buy this phone. And we live in the middle of no where and get great signal.

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I've had this phone for a little under a year. It really is a good phone, sturdy, reliable. It has AIM, Yahoo, and MSN along with Email and Youtube.

I bought it when it was relatively new and a bit more expensive then it is now.

Overall, Good phone for a good price.

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This phone has a fantastic keyboard and loads Youtube videos and Facebook very quickly, making it useful when you're bored and want to kill time. However, the phone isn't too great when it comes to doing what phones are supposed to do: making phone calls.

The touchpad disappears and has to be controlled by the user. I've missed quite a few calls because I didn't get the touchpad to appear quickly enough or had it fail to respond when I pressed the answer button. Going through an automated system is a nuisance with this phone because of how fincky the keypad is. It is very sensitive to smudges and sweat on the keypad, and won't work too well if either are present making it a less than ideal phone for Florida in the summer which is what led me to replace it after a short 4 months.

My phone also had frequent "system errors" when I closed the slide out keyboard and took several minutes to recover.

This phone also had really really lousy service, even for a Boost phone. We live in a semi-rural area and my husband's (also boost but different model) phone had significantly better signal virtually everywhere we went except right in the middle of town.

All in all, for 80 dollars, I was not happy with the phone and wanted to get rid of it within a month of purchase.