Sanyo M1 multimedia flip phone

Sanyo's new clamshell stresses substance over style with 1GB internal memory and dedicated music buttons. Is the extra heft worth its weight?

Design

The Sanyo M1 resembles a Jeep more than a cell phone. It has a large blocky shell with a circular music control button on its face, like a round Jeep headlight, and the hinge sticks out when the clamshell is open. The M1 is narrow but disconcertingly thick, and when we first opened it we wondered how such a large phone could have buttons that seem so small. The phone's various ports -- for AC power, headphones, and a data cable -- are protected by rubber covers that you peel open, and though this is probably safer for the phone, trying to flick them open was an annoying process.

Calling - Very good

The Sanyo M1 makes calls that sound good, clean and accurate with no static and little trouble from background noise, although breathing sounds were a bit of an issue due to a microphone that faced our mouth. Reception also could have been better; we got three bars on the Sanyo M1 while our Palm Treo 700p got four on the same network. Also, the phone has a strange bug: if it's set to vibrate and you plug it in to charge, it switches to silent mode instead of turning the ringer on (as do most other phones). Hopefully Sanyo will fix this in a firmware update. The phone features a dedicated speakerphone button, which is a nice touch, as well as all our favorite amenities, such as Bluetooth, three-way calling, and voice tagging (although not speaker-independent voice dialing). The address book holds a suitable number of fields, including e-mail and URL fields. Your contact list can also be backed up to Sprint's servers thanks to a subscription backup plan. In our tests of battery life, we got about three hours, 20 minutes of talk time, which is about a half hour less than Sanyo claims.

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