Seeing that I live here in the Northeast United States, I don't review many Alltel phones. The nation's #5 carrier steadfastly stays out of my neck of the woods. But there's a reason everyone, especially Verizon Wireless users, should take a look at Alltel's new RAZR2 V9m. It shows just how fast and smooth the RAZR2 experience can be, even with the same CDMA and BREW technologies Verizon uses.

The Alltel RAZR2 looks almost identical to the Sprint and Verizon models, except it's gray where the Verizon model is brownish. (They're essentially the same hardware.) Like the other RAZR2s, this is a big, luxurious slab of metal and glass dominated by a huge 2-inch, 320 by 240 external screen. It's a hair thinner than AT&T's model, but at 4.1 by 2.1 by 0.5 inches and 4.16 ounces, it's not going to pass for a "small" phone any time soon. The front is dominated by the best external screen ever planted on a flip phone. Consisting of 320 by 240 pixels and sporting 65 thousand colors, it's higher-res than the main screen of most phones. A tiny, two-megapixel camera sits above that screen. Side buttons control volume and launch the camera, and virtual buttons on the big outside screen activate the call log, music player and recent message list. The phone vibrates gently when you press any of these keys. This is the only RAZR2 I tested that lets you read your SMS messages on its external screen, a feature that really should be standard on all of them. Below the volume buttons sits an obnoxious MicroUSB port, for charging, PC connectivity, and headsets. Basically microUSB headsets and cables can be very hard to find.

As I'm not in an Alltel native coverage area, it's very difficult for me to test Alltel phones' call quality and data capabilities. In my experience, Alltel phones' relationship with New York City's Verizon Wireless network can gently be described as "cranky." But this phone uses the same hardware as Verizon's V9m, and on the same Verizon network, I got the same call quality--excellent. The phone is loud, with surprisingly little distortion at top volumes and a powerful speakerphone. I heard just a touch of volume wobble, same as on the Sprint version. There's no CrystalTalk feature here. Rather than canceling background noise in the mic, the phone ramps up your voice and pushes it over the noise, making your voice sound a bit hollow but definitely audible. Talk time, at nearly five hours, is very good, and the phone works with both mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets.

Alltel's user interface feels faster and more responsive than the Verizon or Sprint versions. Alltel's music player sorts by artist, album or genre, unlike Sprint's, and plays WMA, MP3 and AAC music files, though no DRM-protected files, through the powerful speaker or over a Bluetooth headset. It's perfectly usable with the flip closed, navigating with the external screen. As with all RAZR2s, you can use up to a 2GB memory card here.

Alltel's other major secret sauce is Celltop, a fun, highly user-configurable information application that, alas, only runs with the flip open. Celltop is a little like Yahoo! or Google widgets for your cell phone. With the application, you can buy, configure and rearrange half-screen chunks like weather, news headlines, a stock ticker or even rodeo scores. It's a fun and unique solution if a wee bit slow, and it's a real pity it doesn't run on the external screen.

TeleNav GPS navigation (for $10/month) and XM Radio Mobile music streaming (for $8/month) also can run on the device, but IM and email options are perplexingly missing. There's just one email program, and it costs $5.49/month. That's unacceptable. The browser is also an uninspiring piece of WAP crap, especially compared with Sprint's and AT&T's superior browsers. (Opera Mini won't run on BREW phones.) Like the Sprint and Verizon models, this is an EVDO Rev 0 phone, which means if you connect it via USB to your PC, you'll get speeds hopefully averaging around 700-800 kbps down and about 120-140 kbps up. I couldn't test modem use, however, because of missing PC drivers at the time of this writing.

If you've read this far, Verizonites, I might as well let the secret out. Often, the Alltel software for Motorola phones runs on Verizon versions of those phones. Using a relatively complex procedure, hackers have 'reflashed' many Verizon phones to their Alltel equivalents, along the way speeding up the interface and getting rid of Verizon's menu system, which many more advanced mobile users dislike. Will the RAZR2 follow suit? I hope so.

I'm no expert on Alltel phones because PC Magazine's New York Labs aren't in Alltel's coverage area, so I test relatively few of them. So I'm not about to decide whether this is the top Alltel handset. Rather, I'd like to point out that it shows ways where Verizon Wireless users may want to jump over to Alltel. This phone offers more flexible music format support in its music player, a faster interface, Celltop, and the ability to read text messages on the external screen. Why can't all RAZR2s have these options? That's the U.S. wireless market for you.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 4 hours 58 minutes

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