Huawei Mercury (Cricket Wireless)

Talk about a pleasant surprise. The best prepaid smartphone in the U.S. comes from Huawei and Cricket, a manufacturer and a carrier that haven't been bywords for quality in the past. But it's true: the $249.99 Huawei Mercury, paired with Cricket's terrific $55 contract-free monthly plan, beats other cell phones on Cricket, MetroPCS, Virgin, and Boost.

A gigantic Chinese manufacturer, Huawei has been slowly improving with time. It's turned out a middling smartphone, the Impulse 4G for AT&T ($29.99, 3 stars), and a decent tablet, the Springboard 4G for T-Mobile ($249.99, 3.5 stars). The Mercury is a quantum leap for the company: a good looking Android smartphone, with great call quality, a sharp display, and a solid camera. It's an easy pick for our Editors' Choice.

Design, Call Quality, and Pricing
The Huawei Mercury is the sharpest looking phone we've seen from Huawei to date. It measures 4.8 by 2.4 by .4 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.9 ounces. Though light and comfortable to hold, it feels like a substantial, quality device. Made entirely of shiny black plastic with a glass front panel, the Mercury has an appealing, minimalist-chic flair. That back panel is a bit smudge-prone, but it wipes clean whenever you put the phone in your pocket.

The Mercury's 4-inch glass capacitive touch LCD screen has 854-by-480-pixel resolution,? a notch above the more common 800-by-480. It looks sharp and bright, and I had no problem typing on the on-screen keyboard. Since this resolution is also used by Motorola's super-popular Droid line, it didn't seem to affect app compatibility. Four haptic feedback-enabled touch keys sit below the display.

The Mercury is a tri-band EV-DO Rev. A (850/1900/AWS) device, with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. Outside Cricket's native coverage area (about a third of the U.S. population), it runs on Sprint's nationwide network. The phone connected to my WPA2-encrypted Wi-Fi network quickly and easily.

Reception on Sprint's network was average, and voice quality was very good overall. Voices sound clear, full, and natural in the phone's earpiece. On the other end, calls sound clear and easy to understand, with good noise cancellation. My only complaint is that voices can sound a touch muffled. Calls were clear through an Aliph Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars), and voice dialing worked well without training. The speakerphone also sounds good, but it's far too low to hear outdoors. Battery life was excellent at 8 hours, 16 minutes of talk time. There's no Wi-Fi hotspot mode, but that isn't to be expected with this cheap a service plan.?

Cricket offers smartphone plans with unlimited talk, text, and 1GB of data for $55/month, at least $5/month less than all the major carriers. Boost and Virgin both match that price, and Boost's 'shrinkage' option can actually reduce your cost to $40/month as you pay your bills on time. MetroPCS has a $50/month plan with roughly the same terms as well. The Mercury is a better phone than all those carriers currently have, though.

OS, Performance, and Apps
The Huawei Mercury runs Android 2.3.5 (Gingerbread). There's no word yet on an update to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Huawei has modified the UI, which will annoy lovers of stock Android, but I found most of the changes to be pleasant. In general, things look brighter and friendlier than stock Android; think back to TouchWiz 3.0 on the original Samsung Galaxy S and you'll get the idea.

There?s some non-deletable bloatware from Cricket, but less than you'll find on many other Android phones, which is nice. The phone syncs email, calendars, and contacts for Gmail and?Microsoft?Exchange accounts, and works with many other popular email accounts. The Android Market offers access to over 250,000 third-party apps, nearly all of which should work fine on this device. There's also an FM radio, which worked well.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/YHeredX3WZs/0,2817,2398212,00.asp

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