Rs. 35 K @ Mumbai, MH (Part 1 of 2). Review on Kyocera Smartphone 7135

I’ve had this company provided CDMA (WLL) smartphone for over 8 months now. Despite all the fancy features, my 2 year old Nokia has a much better/intuitive user interface.

According to the

Phone -> Phone Info -> Call Timers menu,

I have made/got almost 4,100 calls on the handset using up over 300 hours (18,250 min) of talk time.

That works out to an avg of over 1 hour/day of calls (both incoming & outgoing).

Can’t wait until I get my first bill (yes I have not yet got one)!

Price

The Kyocera was around Rs. 45 K then and is expected to be about 35 K by Diwali. I guess that it would hit 30 K at that rate by early next year (2004 q1). I would not personally shell out that much (even @ Rs. 25 K) for a mobile so I rate it as poor value for money despite the benefits of having a Palm PDA built in.

I was really sad about being forced to return my trusty old company GSM. What I miss the most about my Nokia is the Auto-Redial feature if the line was busy/no answer. How could Kyocera forget such an important/basic feature in its fancy smartphone?

Performance

The software is a bit unstable even after an upgrade a few months ago so the ability to sync with my laptop via infra-red link is most valuable when I have to do a ’hard reset’ and remove the battery which erases all the data.

Adding non-volatile memory to this phone would be a good step (but only after adding auto-redial first!).

The large color screen is excellent and using it as a wireless modem is good.

The theoretical max is about 200 Kb/s but the peak I’ve ever seen is about 128 Kb with a sustained throughput of around 50-60 K. Still better than a landline.

Wish List

I also need a way to track my incoming & outgoing min. It currently only tracks total min but since incoming is free for me, it does not give me a sense of my usage. There should be an app provided that automatically resets the counter at a user specified date (defaulting to the 1st) each month or week. It should also track the last 12 months or 52 weeks of usage min since there is enough space.

A camera or radio as accessories would always be welcome. I would like to listen to MP3 without having to buy additional hardware (memory key/stick like addon is currently required) as long as I have the space.

A customisable screen saver and banner like Nokia would also be an improvement since there seems to be so much valuable screen space going to waste. It should also allow the user to display the day & date (not just the time) on the main phone screen. An estimate of battery life remaining (like on laptops) would be very helpful in terms of standby and talk times.

Cons

The battery gets quite hot while surfing/extended use. Maybe the battery cover could be made of a different material. A voice mail app on the phone would be useful when the service providers vmail is quite bad as an alternative.

The recent calls list is confusing: duplicates should be automatically removed and for entries in the phonebook with multiple # (work, home, mobile, etc) it should specify which one since there is space on the same row.

This would save us from clicking each entry to see which # the call was from/to.

Pros

The Palm games were fun to play especially the board (monopoly) and card (hearts) games.

Since I make some international calls the free Palm world time app (downloadable) with map & customisable time zones is quite helpful.

Here are the two most useful sites I found for downloading Palm apps:

https://mrtaxi.karnt.com/

I can also store family/wallet photos in the phone but first have to change their format on a PC before sync-ing up.

The phone came pre-loaded with MGI PhotoSuite (Mobile Album) and it can be downloaded from:

https://photosuite.com/palm

There is a slideshow option that allows you to preview all the photos in 3-5 sec intervals which is very handy for the older members of the family who are not comfortable with using a mouse or stylus to flip.

The 2nd part of this review is at:

https://mouthshut.com/readreview/45308-1.html

since I've run out of space here...

Hate the 8K limit!