The ZTE Chorus ($49.99) is just weird. It's based on Android, but it's not a smartphone. It supports Cricket's Muve Music service, but audio quality is poor. It has touch screen that isn't responsive, terribly short battery life, and a back cover you can pry off just by looking at it. You get unlimited talk, text, data, and music for $55 per month, but for just $10 more, you can get all of that on a bonafide smartphone that will run scores of apps. The ZTE Chorus is interesting, to be certain, but that's about all it has going for it.

Design, Call Quality, and Plan Pricing
The Chorus measures 4.4 by 2.3 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.7 ounces. It's comfortable to hold, but a little thick. The phone is made entirely of shiny, smudge-prone black plastic, with a silver band separating the back from the front. The 3.2-inch plastic touch screen sports 240-by-400-pixel resolution. It gets bright enough, but text and other details look jagged. The bigger problem is responsiveness. It's a resistive screen, so touch doesn't register as easily as it does on a capacitive part. I often had to repeat swipes or taps a number of times before they would work. And typing is a nightmare due to the tiny onscreen keyboard and that resistive screen. There are two equally unresponsive touch keys beneath the display, as well as a physical button that opens up Muve.

The Chorus is a triband EV-DO Rev A (850/1700/1900 MHz) device with no Wi-Fi. Cricket uses its own network in about a third of the country, and Sprint's network in the rest. Reception on Sprint's network where I tested in New York was iffy, and voice quality just mediocre. Volume is low in the earpiece, yet voices sound fuzzy and distorted the higher you raise it. Calls made with the phone sound muffled, like you're talking into a pillow, and background noise cancellation is poor. Calls sounded better through a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars) but voice dialing didn't work at all. The speakerphone is loud enough to use outside, but voices sound harsh. Battery life was dismal at just 3 hours and 4 minutes of talk time.

Cricket offers a single plan for the Chorus that includes unlimited talk, text, data, and music from Muve for $55 per month. That's a significant step up from its other feature phones plans, which start at $35 (though that's just for unlimited talk and text). 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.) Those prices are more affordable than all the major carriers, but still more expensive than Boost Mobile's $55 per month smartphone plan, which can actually reduce to $40 per month as you pay your bills on time. You don't get unlimited music with Boost, though.

The problem is, for $65 per month, you can get the same Muve Music plan on a genuine smartphone, like the ZTE Score ($69.99, 3 stars). Though strictly midrange, a smartphone like the Score opens up a whole new world of possibilities and features the Chorus can't touch.

OS and Multimedia
Like the Motorola i886 for Sprint ($99.99, 3.5 stars), the ZTE Chorus is a feature phone that runs on Android. Exactly what version of Android that is, I don't know. I poked around in the Settings menu, but couldn't find any clues that give away what's going on beneath the hood. It shouldn't really matter, because the Chorus is being sold as a feature phone.

Traces of Android abound, though. There's a full HTML Android Web browser, which is a pleasant upgrade from the less capable browsers found on many other feature phones. But there's no Android Market, so you can't use the plethora of apps designed for Android smartphones. There's a Cricket Storefront app, but it's more like a standard feature phone app store.

Oddly, there's also no built-in email support, which is one of Android's strongest features, though you can access it within the browser. There are three home screens you can swipe between, though I couldn't tell if the lack of responsiveness was from the resistive touch screen or the phone's 600MHz processor.

There's a microSD card slot underneath the battery cover, and you must remove the battery in order to access it. Careful though: That battery cover is awful flimsy, and can pop off with little more than a hard flick. Once opened, you'll notice the included microSD card 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 133MB of free internal storage. Music sounded fine over both wired earbuds and Altec Lansing Backbeat Bluetooth headphones ($99.99, 3.5 stars), but I heard a pervasive hiss when I wasn't listening to music on wired headphones. The Chorus was able to play AAC, MP3, OGG, and WAV music files. For videos, DivX, H.264, and MP4 video files played back fine at resolutions up to 800-by-480.

The 2-megapixel camera is poor. Test photos show average detail, but mostly look hazy and washed out. The camera also records video at a low 352-by-288-pixel resolution. Videos are tiny and grainy, and play back at a choppy 11 frames per second indoors, and 20 frames per second outside.

Muve Music, Alernatives, and Conclusions
We recently took a close look at the Muve Music service in a full review of the ZTE Score. At $10 per month, Muve is an affordable unlimited mobile music service. It had some problems when we first saw it on the Samsung Suede (3 stars), but has steadily improved since then. There are still some annoying interface issues, and audio quality is less than stellar, but there's a nice big selection that should please most music fans.

The bigger question is: Why Muve? You can download Rhapsody or Spotify on any Android smartphone and pay $9.99 per month for unlimited music. Ultimately, what it comes down to is which service has the music you're interested in. Take a good look at each before making your decision, and choose the one that has the most songs you want to listen to.

Once you've made that decision, don't get the Chorus. If you must have Muve, the ZTE Score is your best bet. It will cost you $10 more per month, but you'll get a nicer, more responsive display, many additional features, and you can connect to Wi-Fi when available instead of 3G. If you prefer Rhapsody, MetroPCS offers the more expensive Samsung Galaxy Attain ($199, 3.5), which has a sharper display, faster processor, and a better camera than the Chorus.

If you don't need an unlimited music plan built into your phone bill, the Huawei Mercury ($179.99, 4.5 stars) is the best prepaid smartphone you can get right now. It has a terrific 4-inch display, a good camera, great call quality, and a fast 1.4GHz processor. And if you want unlimited music, there's an app for that.

Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 3 hours 4 minutes

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