The Verizon G'zOne goes where no other phone has gone before: into the bathtub, the swimming pool, or, dare I say, the toilet. This unique, rugged phone is the nation's first fully waterproof cell phone.

The G'zOne has an interesting pedigree. It's a popular phone originally made by Casio for the Japanese market that has since been imported by UT Starcom for Verizon Wireless. It looks like no other phone in the U.S.: a great, hulking (4.1 by 2 by 1.1 inches, 5.3 ounces) Hummer of a device, with a 1.3-inch, 100-by-100 black-and-white circular external screen; a gorgeous 2.2-inch 320-by-240 internal display; a 2-megapixel camera and flashlight that look like portholes; and a big bumper on the bottom of the flip. The headset and power ports are sealed with tight plastic plugs.

To test all this moisture-proofing, I made phone calls in the shower, dunked the G'zOne repeatedly into a fishbowl at our Digital Life trade show and took it for an extended photo shoot in the Gravity Fitness and Spa pool at the Parker Meridien Hotel. UT Starcom says the phone will last only 30 minutes in 3 feet of water. But I dropped it into the deep end of the pool—6 feet—and dove for it (unfortunately, the phone doesn't float) without a problem.

Shower calls came through just fine, with the percussive rat-tat-tat of water droplets clearly audible. Underwater photos looked sharp, at least with objects and people close at at hand. If you record video underwater, you get sound as well. You can't make calls if the antenna is fully submerged—water seems to refract cellular signals in the same way it does light. But you can make calls with just the mouthpiece under water, though as you might expect, you hear the "blub, blub, blub" of bubbles.

The G'zOne is ruggedized, like the Nextel i580.I bounced it off a concrete sidewalk (no damage) and played both hacky sack and "phone bowling" with it in the office (no problem.)

Phone calls on the G'zOne sound terrific, sharp and clear, and the earpiece and speakerphone are both loud. I heard a touch of volume wobble in the earpiece and microphone, but not enough to really bother me (I'm just very attuned to these things). The vibrate motor is quite powerful. The phone has speaker-independent voice dialing that works well enough. Unfortunately, the speakerphone doesn't work with the flip closed.

Since this is a Casio, the G'zOne has some unique watch-like features: a stopwatch and countdown timer, which you can activate with the flip open or closed.

The phone's 2-megapixel camera, with a bright LED flash, works both underwater and on dry land. You save photos and 176-by-144, 15-second videos into the 15MB of onboard photo memory (there's also an extra 20MB for downloadable games and applications), but there's no good way to download photos directly to your PC. Instead, you must picture-message them to your e-mail address. The camera also seemed oddly nearsighted out of the water; photos taken at a distance of 10 feet or less are sharp enough, if a little soft, and photos taken at a greater distance were genuinely blurry. I didn't notice this issue while shooting underwater. Of course in the pool all my subjects were pretty close.

As it lacks Bluetooth, a music player, and removable memory, the G'zOne isn't a full-scale multimedia phone such as the Nextel i580. The handset does come with an adapter so you can use standard wired cell-phone headsets with the G'zOne's oddball headset jack.

One of the G'zOne's most useful talents is its ability to hook up to PCs and work with Verizon's BroadbandAccess Connect plan as a laptop modem on its fast EV-DO network. The EV-DO capability, which lets the G'zOne also watch V Cast Video, comes at a price: no analog coverage. Verizon has the broadest nationwide digital network, but some of the hardcore outdoor folks attracted by this phone will be saddened by the lack of an analog fallback.

The G'zOne is available now at VerizonWireless.com for $299.99 with a two-year contract. The Nextel i580 is still my all-around choice for rugged phones, thanks to its uncompromising set of multimedia features and Direct Talk off-network walkie-talkie system. But the G'zOne holds a special place in my heart as the phone I'd take to the beach, the pool, or the fishing pond.

Benchmark tests:
Continuous talk time: 3 hours 38 minutes

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