VOICE-DATA CELL SERVICE SPRINT www.sprint.com $55 per month

If you were stranded on a deserted island (or, say, Rhode Island or Long Island) and could choose only one phone service, what would it be? We'd pick Sprint's PCS.

Sprint offers several options for people who need both voice and data capabilities from a single device. For $55 a month, customers get 500 cellular minutes with long-distance, nights, and weekends included. Spend an extra $5 a month and get unlimited, secure access to your E-mail, calendar, company directory, and personal contacts. You can retrieve or synchronize that data from your PC to wireless devices via the Sprint nationwide wireless network.

Also part of the service is Sprint's Wireless Web Browser. Customers can access the Internet or, for extra charges, tap into customer-relationship management applications from Salesforce.com and Siebel Wireless so they can track sales opportunities, access calendars and contact lists, and review orders.

Late last month, Sprint rolled out a feature that lets customers access business applications via instant messaging. For about $7 per user per month, customers create an IM list of applications and communicate with them just as they would if they were chatting. "Sprint is totally on the wave of the future," says Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research, of the IM service. "Wireless and data are the two big growth areas in telecom, and Sprint's product-engineering team is doing well in both."

MicroEdge Inc., which sells software to fund-raising companies, agrees. It uses Sprint PCS phones and its wireless access cards for notebook computers, at a cost of $99 a month for unlimited downloads or $40 for 40 Mbytes of downloads. The IT staff uses the phones to send E-mail alerts when there's a problem, eliminating the need for pagers. The wireless cards, which run over Sprint's 3G network, provide up to 166 Kbps access--a "great productivity saver," says MicroEdge MIS manager Robb Quattro, who commutes two hours each day from Philadelphia to New York and relies on the service to check E-mail and help-desk requests.

Sprint also provides advanced voice options. PCS Integrated Office works with a company's existing telecom infrastructure, so a cell phone can be used as an extension of a desktop phone.--Robin Gareiss