gdgt

When I first was contemplating switching to the Straight Talk network, I wasn't sold on their phone selection. I would have loved to get a Droid Eris or Nexus one, but that just wasn't in the budget at the time. I a big believer in choosing your network first and your phone second, so the first thing I did was compare my current plan with Cricket Mobile (on the Sprint network) at $38 a month (after tax) to Straight Talk Mobile (on the Verizon Network) at $32 a month (again after tax).

The Network:
+ The Verizon Network has great signal almost everywhere in my city and is by far the best carrier here.
+ Call quality is very good on this phone and the Verizon network, much better than my Cricket phone which began to stink once it went more mainstream.
+ Even though Cricket is on the Sprint Network, it's not recognized as a Spring number for much of anything, which means no facebook or twitter support, etc. This is one area where I really loved Straight Talk. Their numbers are actually register with Verizon, so I've integrated my phone with Facebook, Twitter, Google Voice, and Google Calendar for a significantly better end-user experience.
= Sprint my have "4G" already, but that doesn't mean anything to me since my plan with Cricket didn't include data.

The Phone: General Use
= The navigation on phone is fairly good, with quick access to everything you need a phone for (making calls, receiving calls, checking voicemail, texting). Nothing really spectacular though.

The Phone: Additional Hardware Features
+ MicroSD card slot is a huge plus.
+ Full soft-touch QWERTY keyboard makes it so I actually text now (where with my old Cricket phone I turned off texting because it didn't make sense to pay an additional $5/mo for something I never used).
+ Transfer cable for computer is a nice thing to buy
+ Bluetooth capable
- Bluetooth file-transfer only goes one way (from your phone to your computer) so while you can easily move photos you've taken to your computer, moving music to your device requires a SD card reader or the aforementioned transfer cable (usually about $5 for either one).

The Phone: The Camera
+ 1.3 Megapixel means that at full resolution, your pictures are just good enough to be used on facebook.
- Slow shutter time and poor light sensor means those photos aren't that good.

The Phone: Internet/Browser
- Typical dumbphone browser setup.
+ QWERTY keyboard makes this not such a bad thing.
- While you can change your homepage, Straight Talk resets it to their's every time you open the browser, which adds one additional step that I don't want to access my Google Calendar.

The Phone: Music Player
+ It has an mp3 player.
- The mp3 player is crap (I still use it though - it's just crapy).

The Phone: Contacts & Calendar
= Contacts work like you'd expect from a dumbphone as does the calendar.
- The calendar doesn't know how to do reoccurring events.
+ Since it's a real Verizon number, you can setup your Google Calendar to send you text messages for your meetings/appointments which allows me to keep just one thing up to date.

The Phone: Texting
+ Again the QWERTY keyboard.
+ Real Verizon number means it works with a lot of services.

The Verdict:
On the Straight Talk network you'll only be spending $32 for 1000 minutes, 1000 texts, free 411, & 35MB or data so don't skimp on the phone. This has been the best phone I've ever owned, and while I would love to see Straight talk launch an Android phone (especially the Verizon version of the Nexus One), this will certainly hold me over until the LTE revolution.

I recommend you buy it!