Customer Rating: 
Summary: Super Durable!!! Low SAR!!
Comment: This is the best phone that I have owned. It was really important to me to find a phone with a low SAR rating (SAR, 'specific absorption rate', is an indication of the amount of radiation that is absorbed into a head while using a cellular phone, the higher the SAR rating the more radiation that is absorbed into the head). Motorola Razr phones typically have high SAR ratings (you can google your phone make and SAR online). Not only is the SAR for Katana II low, but it is also amazingly durable. I put my phone (by accident) through the washer for 30 minutes AND dryer for over 45 minutes and it still works perfectly (it took about a day to dry out)!!! I have also dropped it many times and it is fine (these things happen)! It is light weight and has great sound quality. I have no problems with the user interface. It is a great phone for someone who just wants a good quality, sleek phone, not a music player. The pictures it takes are of really reasonable quality. I am very very happy with my phone!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Mostly Great, Some Disappointments
Comment: First of all, ignore my review of the Motorola V180 Quad-Band GSM Mobile Phone (Silver/Black) flip phone back in 2004. I was way too kind, and the phone was terrible. My Motorola bias was in full-swing. In fact, I think I might be finished with Motorola. The Motorola backlash is strong, and I finally agree with it. Clunky user interfaces, poor speed, and poor battery life took their toll.
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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Needs work, would not reccomend
Comment: I recently got this phone after switching over to Sprint. The interface is boring and non-intuitive, and the buttons are difficult to press. I will be returning this phone, and do not recommend it for anyone. I switched over from an AT&T/Samsung A707 "Sync" so it could be that the old phone spoiled me for all new phones...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Katana II has awkward user interface
Comment: The selection of features is, in general, nice, but poorly thought-out. For example, if you want to leave your phone turned on, but locked, you'll need to press a key sequence of at least 7 keys (more if you haven't set up a shortcut to take you to the security menu).
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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: This Katana could be a bit sharper
Comment: This is my first non-samsung phone in over 10 yrs. So far it compares very favorably to anything samsung I have ever owned, feature per feature Katana is just better, built quality is higher and the design is more ergonomic.
Now, having said that, I don't use cameras, I don't text, the internets and other non-essential services are shut down completely. So I can't vouch if the phone is good in those departments. It is good in the department where it counts: it has a good battery life, it has a actually usable speaker and works in more places where samsung didn't work (in the elevators for example)
Now the cons: There is no dedicated power charging input. The power is supposed to go through the data cable. This is very inconvenient, but it seems that most of the recent phones are going away with the dedicated power inputs. Why? What was so wrong about it? Who knows. As a result I have to throw away good dozen different power chargers that accumulated over the years.
Another cons is that when syncing up data with your computer (through the above mentioned data cable) there is no way to put any images, wallpapers or ringers on the phone. One can easily sync up addresses and calendar, but putting images and sound into the phone is disabled. Again, why ?
I guess both of these flaws are intentional as they do generate a fair amount of money for sprint, after all I have to buy now new chargers that are not subsidized and if I wanted to customize the phone with a new sound or image, again, I would have to pay to sprint to be able to do so.
Rated 4 out 5, as the phone itself is quite good.
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