Design & Features
4.5
What sets Rumor apart from your basic bar phone - and justifies its somewhat chunky profile - is the slide-out QWERTY thumbboard. Turn the handset on its side the long way and push the top panel up and Rumor reveals a full 32-key layout done up in a blue-on-blue finish with easy to read white labels on the buttons. With the keyboard extended I found Rumor pretty comfortable to hold horizontally— the handset fit nicely between my hands with my index fingers bent around the back of the phone and my thumbs poisted in typing position. Rumors rounded edges were comfortable against the skin of my hands, and while the QWERTY keys are a bit on the small side, I found them more than good enough for accurate thumb-typing.
Extending the QWERTY board auto-rotates the phone’s display and fires up the messaging application by default. Unlike the experience on most smartphones, Rumor’s auto-rotation kicks in immediately, and by the time I had the device physically rotated in my hands I’d been met with a choice of messaging options including integrated IM, Email, and Facebook clients as well as the standard SMS, MMS, and Voicemail software. One minor note about using Rumor in messaging mode - the positioning of the D-Pad on the phone’s front panel makes it easy for left- or right-handed use in vertical orientation, but basically demands that you use your left thumb when holding the phone horizontally. Though I’m not sure how designers could have positioned the D-Pad differently without making the device much larger overall, it would have been nice to be able to use my right thumb to navigate menus in messaging mode.
Beyond its focus on messaging, Rumor offers entry-level feature phone applications such as WAP-only Web browsing, a media player with microSD memory card slot and 2.5mm stereo headphone jack, and basic personal information management and gaming. Rumor also offers some higher-end features including Stereo Bluetooth support, A-GPS with voice-enhanced navigation services, and an optional $2.99/mo feature called “Social Zone,” which provides mobile access to a bunch of online communities.
Some customers will be disappointed to learn that Rumor is a Sprint Vision device, which means it’s only capable of 1x RTT data access and won’t work on the faster EV-DO network like the carrier’s “Power Vision” devices. As such there’s no access to Sprint’s Music Store or TV offerings, and no browsing of the “real Web,” to be found here. Rumor’s more than speedy enough for Email, Instant Messaging, and browsing of “mobile” (WAP) Websites, but it pales in comparison to Sprint’s more advanced phones or the Samsung Alias, Verizon’s messaging-focused VCast handset.
