Cricket's Sanyo Zio gets pricing

Three weeks after teasing us with a promo of its first Android handset, we finally get pricing and a release date for the Sanyo Zio. The Zio, which will ship by August 21, is $229 if you place a preorder on Cricket's Web site. The full price without the Web discount is an additional $20, but keep in mind that Cricket won't make you sign a contract.

It was originally known as the Kyocera Zio M6000 when it made its debut earlier this year at CTIA; Kyocera owns the Sanyo brand. The Zio is a touch-screen device with a standard candy bar design. We're not pleased that it runs Android 1.6, but we don't mind that the feature set sticks to the basics. After all, Android should be available to all kinds of users. Inside you'll find a 3.2-megapixel camera, a video player with 30 frames per second, Wi-Fi, voice dialing, a music player, a digital compass, a full HTML browser, stereo Bluetooth, assisted GPS, support for 3G EV-DO networks, and the usual Google applications.