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Interface
Unlike some other Android phones, the Sprint Force doesn't have an extra layer of "flavor" laid on top of it in order to customize the experience for you. Everything here is fairly straightforward Ice Cream Sandwich experience, and as usual is built around the Google ecosystem.
So, you'll want to sync your account with an existing account if possible, in order to get the full experience. The base apps like for mail and browsing the web are decent, but you'll get more mileage out of something custom like the Gmail app.
You'll get a main home screen, with two off to either side for a total of five, and you can nest items inside folders to stay organized. The Google Search bar adorns the top of each home screen, and unfortunately cannot be deleted or repositioned. The favorites bar at the bottom can be customized, and there is a "Power Control" widget that gives you quick access to settings like Bluetooth, Brightness, and so on.
The onscreen keyboard is narrower than we would normally like, and the addition of buttons for Swype and the microphone, among others, depending on what app your in, don't help alleviate this. Landscape mode presents the best way to type, but to input text via portrait mode, you'll be relegated to careful typing so you don't hit stray characters, or finally learning how to rock Swype.
Contacts and Calling
The installed Contacts app is serviceable, although it took several Sync attempts with our Google account before it would finally populate with our own entries. Even after that, the photos from Facebook that normally get attached to each contact took a lot longer. This was over WiFi, and there was no way to track how much had been updated, and the result was being left with a Spartan-looking contact list. But there are a multitude of options for each Contact, and with some massaging, this provided app can do everything you need it to.
For phone calls, the Force is great, with most calls sounding much clearer (and louder) than our iPhone. The little speaker on the back of the phone was fairly impressive, making speakerphone-based calls much easier to hear and understand. You can easily add in other callers for a conference, mute calls, and even record calls from within the app.
Our only unhappy experience with calls on the phone was the fact that Voicemail is a completely separate app. So if you're in the Phone app, you can't see that you have a voicemail. Not only that, but the Voicemail app continually asks if you want to "Subscribe to Premium?" so that you can have your voicemails transcribed, to the tune of an additional $1.99 a month. Some people might find that to be a welcome service, but offering it from within Voicemail is irksome.
Messaging, Email and Internet
The Messaging app offered here might feel bare-boned at first, but with the threaded messages, and the option to send photos, videos, audio, files, and more via text message, it offers everything you'll need. We just wish it would send notices to the lock screen to let us know that messages had arrived when we weren't paying attention.
We quickly started using Gmail on the phone after powering up for the first time, although the base Email app is just fine. Gmail just better integrates with the rest of our Google Overlord lifestyle, and once it was able to sync everything up it was by far our preferred client. Not that you'll find Email limiting, as it offers the some basic functionality as Gmail.
The same was true of the supplied browser, which was entirely serviceable. We just preferred loading up Chrome and importing all of our bookmarks and history. Both perform just fine, although both also have some navigation problems on standard versions of websites. While you might lose some functionality, the mobile versions of sites look better here, in both browsers.
