Sprint Vital

Have you been wanting to get into the phablet game, if only they weren't so expensive? Then Sprint has just the phone?for you. The $99.99 Sprint Vital boasts a 5-inch, 720p display and a solid 13-megapixel camera for about half the price you'll pay for a similarly sized phone anywhere else. It's a good pick if you're looking to get the most screen for your money, but otherwise-average specs mean this phone won't stay fresh as long as most of the pricier options.

Design, Call Quality, and Network
It looks like Sprint and ZTE are continuing to keep their relationship on the down-low. The Vital is Sprint's third smartphone from ZTE this year not to feature any manufacturer branding. That's probably because ZTE doesn't carry the same type of cachet in the U.S. as companies like HTC and Samsung do. But if it keeps making more phones like the Vital, that could change. This is the nicest phone from ZTE that we've seen stateside yet.

The Vital measures 5.59 by 2.81 by 0.39 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.43 ounces. It isn't light, but that weight makes it feel solid rather than bulky. ZTE uses a standard slab design, with minimal embellishment other than the iridescent blue color of the soft-touch back panel. There's a matte grey band around the middle of the phone, and a shiny blue plastic band around the display. The front is one big glass panel, with three touch controls beneath the display. There's a camera Shutter button on the right side of the phone, Volume buttons on the left, and a Power button on top. It's also ULE Platinum Certified for its sustainable build.

The 5-inch IPS LCD features 1,280-by-720-pixel resolution, which works out to 293 pixels per inch. It looks great. Text, images, and video all look detailed and crisp. Given the large display, I had no troubling typing comfortably on the Swype-enabled onscreen keyboard. Just make sure to keep in mind that this is a large phone. We consider any phone with a display of 5 inches or larger to be a phablet, and any phone with a display larger than 4.5 inches to be potentially difficult to use with just one hand. With the Sprint Vital, for instance, I'm unable to hold the phone in one hand and drag the notifications bar down with my thumb, which is frustrating. But a lot of people love big phones, and the Sprint Vital will work for them.

The Vital supports Sprint's new 4G LTE network as well as its much slower 3G network. In last year's tests for the?Fastest Mobile Networks?we found Sprint's 3G network to be the slowest nationwide. We got a chance to test Sprint's 4G LTE network?in New York City and found it to be a vast improvement. Unfortunately, LTE availability is still extremely limited, so chances are you'll be trudging along with 3G until it comes to your town.

Sprint LTE is limited in New York City, where we did most of our testing on the Vital, so the bulk of our tests were conducted over 3G. I did get a chance to test 3G data speeds on Long Island, and found them to be a lot better than I'm used to seeing in the city, with an average of 1.6Mbps down and 1Mbps up. I was able to latch onto a precarious patch of LTE for a few minutes and saw speeds jump to 6Mbps down and 2Mbps up, but my connection was tenuous at best and faded quickly, so take these results with a grain of salt.

Reception was good, but call quality is mixed. Voices sound clear and full in the earpiece but just a little digitized. On the other end, however, calls made with the Vital sound extremely thin, tinny, and grating. They are almost painful to listen to, which could be good if you're looking to get a telemarketer off the line. The speakerphone sounds fine, but isn't quite loud enough to hear clearly outside. The phone had no trouble pairing with my?Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset and standard Android voice dialing worked fine. The large 2,500mAh battery was good for an impressive 13 hours of talk time, and it's removable, so you can carry a spare.

Android and Apps
The Vital is powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8960. That's the same processor you'll find in last year's top Android phones like the Samsung Galaxy S III. The key words here are last year's. Benchmarks scores were solid, and while the Vital is plenty powerful today, that processor has been around for over a year, which can be measured in dog years in the mobile world. You won't have trouble running any of the 850,000+ apps in the Google Play store now, but certain apps, like 3D gaming, aren't going to hold up as well as time goes on. If you're looking for a high-end experience to match your big screen, you'll get better performance for a longer period of time with a quad-core phone like the Samsung Galaxy S 4.

(Next page: Camera, Multimedia, and Conclusions)

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