The Sanyo Katana II (2007) is a welcome hardware update to the original Katana (2004). The Katana II is sleeker, more attractive, and resembles the flip phones that every Japanese manufacturer had in its home market five years ago (with external, customizable LCD displays). It is built well, and has good buttons, except for super-thin volume rocker buttons next to the display. Also, very important, it has excellent battery life. The user interface is good for an entry-level phone. But don’t expect many customization options or the ability to upload pictures and ring tones onto the phone. Apparently it cannot be done with either a USB cable or Bluetooth, whether phone-to-phone or PC-to-phone. I wish I had known that before buying it. It is not a deal-breaker for me, but for perhaps half the users out there, it is. The USB cable available for this phone seems to be for charging only.

My previous phone was a Motorola Q. It was beyond bad. Average battery life was a dismal 12 hours, requiring me to get an extra charger for my office. The Katana II has excellent standby time. The RAZR has been known to have a standby time of 6 or 7 days. At the time of this review, I have gone 3 days without a recharge on the Katana.

The Katana II is designed to be a more affordable competitor to the RAZR. It does almost everything the RAZR does, except sync with other devices. Motorola phones might have clunky interfaces and short battery life, but they support SyncML, which allows them to sync with PCs and MACs running the right software (such as Apple’s iSync). The Katana is able to receive contacts from your old phone via Bluetooth, but after that, you are own your own for adding and editing new contacts. At least Sprint offers their Wireless Backup service ($2 per month) that allows you to manage your contacts on the web.

The Katana has a pretty good default selection of alerts, ring tones, and volume controls. They shouldn’t have bothered with the camera, as it is as terrible as the RAZR or Q. The camera is useless. The Katana has decent memory, a limited calendar application (appointment titles are limited to 15 characters or so), and a decent WAP 2.0 browser (which is just as fast and capable as the awful version of Internet Explorer that came with the Motorola Q). The web browser is restricted to mobile versions of major websites, such as NOAA weather, the BBC, Reuters, ESPN, Facebook, GMail, and iGoogle. Pretty good for an entry-level phone.

Startup time (power-on and connect to CDMA network) is 10 seconds. Shutdown time is 5 seconds. I haven’t seen a Motorola phone come close to that speed.

So overall, the Katana II is an attractive, well-made, thin flip phone with decent web capabilities and a simple, efficient interface. But with the Sanyo mobile phone business being bought by Kyocera, I don’t expect much support for this phone from the manufacturer. The most support will come from Sprint and its Wireless Backup service.
Rating: 3 / 5

Lots of things about it are like that. It seems like the designers were given a list of features to include but that they didn’t spend time figuring out how to make those features conveniently accessible.

For a well-organized user interface, Nokia’s the best I’ve found.
Rating: 3 / 5