Sharp LX2009 PV300 GSM Unlocked Phone

A clamshell-style cellphone, the PV300 was sold under the AT+T/T-Mobile name, Sidekick when they offered data plans for it, however, the phone has now been superseded by others and that leaves the PV300 available for you to use.

You can shop around to find the best cellphone plan available and you can then pay for that. Many people forget that at their hearts, even the best Wii-capable phones for the GSM or UMTS services, still just handheld radios that are capable of operating at their programmed frequencies. And, there's nothing to stop an entrepreneur from buying cell service from an AT+T or another provider and reselling it at a much lower cost than captive data plans are sold at.

Or, to look at it another way, many times you will find that if you purchase a GSM-capable phone and data plan that includes access to AT+T hotspots, all you are really paying for is the direct access to the Internet. Here's an interesting corollary to this which is that there are only so many WiFi phones that can be supported by a node before its performance begins to sag noticeably. This is concentrating on the Internet side of things.

Even though they may have begun their lives as Internet-based phones, phones such as the PV300 are still cellphones that have access to the nation's grid of cell towers and this means two things: 1. you can access cellular service, as long as you pay for it, and 2. you can use the cell system to send messages. Texting was going on before folks decided there was some sort of linkage needed between the Internet and texting and that is how they sell their services.

The PV300 has several features that even today's smartphones can't match. For example, the phone's surface is non-slip which means that when you slide it open to expose the chiclet-style keyboard that lies under the tiltable high-definition screen, the phone is unlikely to go slipping out of your hands across the concourse of a train station or a street corner.

Interestingly, when the cell system is up and functioning normally, you will find that your messages go through just as quickly as those based on WiFi do. The key difference here is that the texts remain with the phone system's provider, rather than on the Internet or in one of your Net-based mailboxes. Still that's not a big deal if you can save $100 or more a month in data charges alone.

What you gain for the savings is not only one of the nicer-feeling keyboards available - the chiclet-style offered by the Sidekick line recognizes that not everyone is a touch-typist and that most people just punch down on keys and that chiclet-style keyboards lend themselves to just plain ordinary text entry via either your thumbs or your thumbs and your index fingers, at whatever force you need to use.

Another feature of the PV300 (Sidekick) line is its high-definition display that is on the large size, at 3.2-inches. The LCD features a resolution of 854 by 480 pixels and offers up 65,000 colors. This offers another benefit because it means that the PV300 can support a 3.2MP camera and flash and that you can take images that you can download the images to your PC or another device and look at them. Interestingly, the 3.2MP resolution that you use is actually the native resolution of most PC systems and so that any photos you take are ready for viewing and sharing instantly.

Perhaps the best feature, though, aside from the traditional swiveling high-definition, large high-contrast display, is the fact that you can shop around for the best data plan you can find to keep your costs down, yet offer you flexibility. It's nice, sometimes, to be free to do as you want.