Cricket announced early October of last that it would offer the Kyocera M1000 rebadged as Lingo. It’s a neat-featured phone geared towards people who likes text. The QWERTY keyboard is large and comfy to use. I like the handset’s dual personalities; candy bar form factor for when I need to use it as a phone and flipping it open for instant text messaging or surf the web.

Click over to watch the unboxing video.

The Lingo’s aesthetics could use a few tweaks, otherwise I don’t mind the boxy chassis too much. When opened horizontally, it reminds me of the LG enV but lacks many of the enV’s 3G multimedia features. It has support for Bluetooth, a 1.3-megapixel camera, voice recognition, pretty decent speakerphone, and productivity tools like tip calculator, calendar, stopwatch, alarm clock, and a countdown timer and voice memo. As far as emails go, it supports POP3 and IMAP4.

I haven’t had enough time to test out the talk and standby time, but according to Kyocera, it should give me around 195 minutes of talk time and 150 hours of standby time.

I was surprised to see that the Lingo’s gold accent wasn’t bad looking at all. Cricket is running a $20 web-only discount off the retail price of $199.99. Your grand total is $179.99. Make sure to check back for a more thorough review in a few days.