ZTE Score (Cricket Wireless)

How does this sound to you: $65 per month for unlimited talk, text, Web, and music with no contract. Pretty good, right? The catch: you're stuck accessing it all with a mediocre Android smartphone. That's the dilemma you face with the ZTE Score ($69.99) for Cricket Wireless. It's a great deal, in need of a better phone.

Design, Call Quality, and Plan Pricing
The ZTE Score measures 4.4 by 2.5 by .5 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.5 ounces. The front and back are made of glass, with a thick ring of matte black plastic separating the two. It looks sharp, and its size makes it comfortable to hold and use. The 3.5-inch touch screen sports 320-by-480-pixel resolution, which is standard for budget Android phones. The onscreen keyboard is a bit small, but I didn't have any trouble typing on it.

The Score is a triband EV-DO Rev A (850/1700/1900 MHz) device with 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. It connected to my?WPA2-encrypted Wi-Fi network?without a problem, but reception on Sprint's network here in New York was shaky and voice quality is mixed. Cricket uses its own network in about a third of the country, and Sprint's network in the rest.

Volume is low in the earpiece, and voices sounded thin and robotic. Calls made with the phone are easy to understand, but again voices sounded computerized and background noise cancellation was poor. Calls sounded better through a Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars) and voice dialing worked fine over Bluetooth without training. The speakerphone sounds fine, but its volume is far too low to use outside. Battery life was on the short side at 4 hours, 49 minutes of talk time.

Cricket offers unlimited smartphone plans with its downloadable Muve Music service for $65/month, which is more affordable than all the major carriers but still more expensive than Boost Mobile's $55/month smartphone plan, which can actually reduce to $40/month as you pay your bills on time. But that extra $10 per month for unlimited music is an attractive option, and one that will likely be a deciding factor for many users. MetroPCS recently started offering a similar plan where $60 per month will get you unlimited talk, text, and Web, along with unlimited music via Rhapsody. (Without Rhapsody, that plan costs $50.)

OS, Multimedia, and Conclusions
The Score runs Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread). There's no word on an update to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), and don't count on one. ZTE has added some light customizations to Android, but they're mostly visual. There are five home screens you can swipe between, and the phone feels surprisingly responsive given its outdated 600 MHz Qualcomm MSM7627 processor.

You get all of usual perks of Android, which include native support for Microsoft Exchange; free Google Maps Navigation for voice-enabled, turn-by-turn GPS directions; a solid?WebKit browser; and compatibility with more than 300,000 third-party apps in the Android Market.

There's a side-mounted microSD card slot on the right side of the phone. Slip the included card out and you'll notice it says "3GB Muve Music, 1GB Your Space." That means the card is divided into two partitions, and the Muve partition is hidden and encrypted. You can only see the extra 1GB on a PC. You also can't use standard MicroSD memory cards for Muve. Cricket doesn't yet sell the special cards the phone accepts, though replacement 4GB and 8GB cards are in the works.

In addition to the 1GB on the microSD card, there's also 110MB of free internal storage. Music sounded fine through both wired earbuds and?Altec Lansing Backbeat?Bluetooth headphones ($99, 3.5 stars), though bass response was somewhat lacking. Outside of Muve, the Score was able to handle AAC, MP3, OGG, and WAV music files. DivX, H.264, and MP4 video files played back smoothly at resolutions up to 800-by-480.

The 3.2-megapixel camera is weak. Test photos look average outdoors, but photos taken inside appear soft and blurry, almost hazy, like a scene from a bad music video. The camera also records video at a low 352-by-288-pixel resolution. Videos are tiny and grainy, and play back at a choppy 12 frames per second indoors, and 15 frames per second outside.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/b18CeTB6GTk/0,2817,2399408,00.asp

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