Conclusion
All in all I really like Rumor. It’s designed to do two things well — make phone calls and send messages — and it succeeds on both counts. While power users want their handsets to do everything including high-speed Web browsing and advanced multimedia playback, Rumor isn’t for power users. Like it’s cousin, the
Alltel Scoop, Rumor is meant for budget-minded folks who text as much as they talk, if not more. As such it packs a very usable full QWERTY keypad into a candy bar form factor that feels good in the hand and is only a bit more bulky than your standard “dialing only” phone.
Yes, Sprint could have made Rumor better by adding Power Vision (EV-DO) and Music Store access and enabling a full HTML Web browser. But that would have jacked the phone’s price up and put it into competition with Sprint’s smartphone lineup. Instead, with Rumor you get simplicity and ease of use and sacrifice some features and screen quality as a trade off. You can still use Rumor to play music side-loaded onto a microSD card and access WAP sites for quick information updates, and the custom Facebook and Social Zone clients extend its reach into the mobile social networking community. All in all I think it’s a fair exchange, and one purposefully meant to appeal to a segment of the market that wants a certain kind of SMS-based bang for as few bucks as possible.
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4.5
