Sprint Phone Connect 3

By Sascha Segan

The Sprint Phone Connect 3 ($149.99, or free with contract) is more trouble than it's worth. Like a voice-over-IP adapter, it's a low-cost replacement home phone solution that's much less expensivethan what you might be paying your monopoly copper phone line provider. But it's a false savings. SprintPhone Connect has poorer voice quality and fewer features than a standard landline, and other VoIPsolutions are cheaper and generally offer better voice quality.

Physical Design and Setup The SprintPhone Connect 3 is a silver box, designed by Huawei, that measures 5.4 by 5.4 by 1.2 inches (HWD) and weighs 14.1 ounces with all of its parts on. It has a 1.8-inch LCD on the front with some slightly confusing navigation buttons below; the interface lets you do things like turn on the device's Bluetooth (more on that below), update the software, and check the phone number. There's a USB port, but it's for diagnostics only.

Setup is easy. Screw on the large antenna, pop in the battery, plug it in, and you're ready to go. There are two standard RJ-11 phone jacks in the back (although the Connect only supports one number). I plugged a VTech cordless phone in and had a dial tone within seconds.

One of the more exotic features here is that the Connect can turn your home phone into a handset for up to two cell phones via Bluetooth 3.0. I paired the Connect with a Google Nexus 5 quickly, and when I dialed the cell number, the home phone rang and answered. Call quality was about what you'd expect from a Bluetooth headset; I'll touch on this more in the next section.

If you just want to use a home phone system over a cellular line, though, there are a bunch of less expensive solutions, like the Cobra PhoneLynx and VTech Connect-To-Cell. They have no additional subscription fee, and piggyback off an existing cell phone.

Performance and Features Why do you want a landline? I can think of a few reasons. Reliable 911, for one. A line that works during power outages. Something with a consistent location that you can't lose. Better voice quality than cellular. A line for faxing, medical devices, point-of-sale, or home security systems.

The Phone Connect 3 succeeds on a few of those points. You'll always know where it is, it has a 911 address attached to it, and the 36-hour backup battery will help in short power outages (although not if Sprint's network goes down).

But call quality was consistently disappointing in my tests, with background hiss and scratchiness. Cellular voice quality is generally lower than landline quality except when making HD Voice calls, which right now can only be done between cell phones on the same carrier. Cell phones compensate for this with aggressive noise cancellation and, in some cases, audio boosting. But landline phones don't do that, so calls sound worse.

You have to make sure to put the device somewhere with very strong Sprint signal, which isn't usually the center of your house, because Sprint's voice network is on a less building-penetrating frequency than AT&T's or Verizon's. Call quality will deteriorate with weaker signal.

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Sprint Phone Connect 3