Though it’s now property of Kyocera, the Sanyo brand continues to live on at the carrier it has called home for many years. Sprint today announced the Sanyo Innuendo, a messaging-friendly handset with a full QWERTY keyboard.
An update to last year’s Sanyo Incognito, the Innuendo borrows heavily from its predecessor’s design. On the outside, there’s a touch keypad with vibrating feedback and a small external display that’s hidden when the backlight is off. We weren’t huge fans of that arrangement on the Incognito, but we’re willing to give it a second chance here. The Innuendo also flips open on a side hinge to reveal a 2.8-inch WQVGA display and the messaging keyboard.
The Innuendo’s feature set is midrange, but it bumps up the camera resolution from 2 to 3.2 megapixels. Other goodies include integrated social-networking apps, a proximity sensor, and MP3 player, a microSD card slot (a 1GB card comes in the box), threaded text messaging, GPS, messaging and e-mail, speaker-independent voice dialing, support for 3G (EV-DO) networks, stereo Bluetooth, a speakerphone, and a personal organizer.
You can buy the Incognito for $49.99 with a two-year contract and after a $50 mail-in rebate. We’ll have a review in the next few days.