i would be pretty suspicious of anyone who complains of "crackly" reception on a sprint phone - if anything sprint service is too digital and spooky quite at times. i do live on oregon where cingular is marginally better than the former att wireless which i had for a decade until their service got so bad i had to switch. i use a treo 650 and our company has a little over 100 phones that go all over oregon, washington, and idaho with a much happier salesforce since we switched from att wireless (tdma) to sprint.

on the data front sprint seems quite robust on the cdma side with evdo sites popping up quite fast around here and yes boys and girls i have personally witnessed some the evdo burst speeds sprint claim and they are quite impressive.