At work we just switched to a sprint phone with sprint direct connect. We switched from nextel because 80% of the towers got shut down in our city and we could hardly use the phone. The new spint direct connect is as bad or worse than the nextel direct connect was the lastg week we had it. Harder to reach people and cuts out more. It doesn't work on roaming either, some areas now only have raoming service. As far as the cell service on the phone, my optimus will have 1/2 to full signal and the sprint phone with direct connect is searching for signal, doesn't happen a lot, but happens. Not sure if the towers just aren't fully upgraded for the new service or what. But the short is, sprint direct connect is not any better than tikl, it still uses data and requires a good data connection to work.