iphone

A special phone we have evaluated is the Kyocera Koi (KX2), a cell phone that has been created to revolutionize this year's market. Released around 01/10/2004 the Koi (KX2) is supporting the networks AMPS 800 / CDMA 800 / 1900. Measuring only 100 x 50 x 25 mm and having a weight of only 114 g, this phone has a perfect design. The Kyocera Koi (KX2) also includes a beautiful camera of 1.2 MP / 1280 x 960 px / 5X Zoom / Flash / Video Recorder. It comes with a 900 mAh Li-Ion battery, letting a talk time of 3.50 hours and lasts in standby around 100 hours. Its engineers included a 16 MB memory, enough a normal use! A cool thing of the Kyocera Koi (KX2) is the speaker phone, which is useful in the car for example! The nice screen of this cell phone is capable of setting wallpapers of 132 x 176 px.
In a world of candy-bar phones, flip phones, and slider phones, the Kyocera Koi/KX2 is a rare swivel phone. Push the screen to the left and it swivels up out of the way to reveal the phone keypad. Keep the phone folded and slide away the handy lens cover, and the phone automatically drops into camera mode—no scrolling through menus or pushing buttons. There's also a big, colorful screen acting as a viewfinder.

Though this phone is probably too large for most pockets, at 3.9 by 1.9 by 0.9 inches (HWD) and 4.0 ounces, its fun factor will likely endear it to users. Well-spaced buttons prevent mistyping, and sound quality is generally excellent, even though the speakerphone is scratchy. We really liked the jog dial on the side of the phone, which makes it easy to navigate the colorful, easy-to-use menus. The contact list only holds 200 names—many phones hold up to 500—but that's still plenty for personal use. If you're not in the mood to swivel, you can answer calls, end calls, and even dial calls from your contact list with the phone closed. Voice dialing, although not speaker-independent, works.

Taking pictures is a breeze: You just hold the phone sideways and click the shutter button at the top. A jog dial lets you change the camera's settings, all the way up to 1,280-by-960 resolution (or up to 15 seconds of video at 176-by-112 and 15 frames per second). The phone stores about 40 pictures at maximum resolution. We wish it had a memory card slot, but it doesn't.

Sadly, the photos taken with the Koi's 1-megapixel camera don't live up to its camera-like interface. Our simulated-daylight shots looked washed out and suffered from color noise; the noise got even worse on pictures taken in low light. The camera was better than the Motorola V710's or the LG VX7000's (both Verizon phones), but it isn't nearly as good as the Nokia 7610's (a non-Verizon phone). This phone won't replace a standalone camera, even a 1MP model. (To see the difference in digital photo quality for yourself, go to our camera-phone image gallery, at go.pcmag.com/cameraphonetests.)

Kyocera wouldn't tell us who would be the carrier for this phone, but it will run on a CDMA network with Brew. (Sounds like the Verizon network to us.) Our test phone came with Tetris and a card game, but no POP3 e-mail reader. Kyocera offers a $45 USB connection kit, which lets you sync contacts, images, videos, and MIDI ringtones with your PC.

The Koi looks great, sounds great, and is downright fun to use. And though the look and feel of the phone screams "camera," like most other camera phones, it won't come close to replacing your digital camera.
The gaming system included in the Kyocera Koi (KX2) is running on BREW, providing cool games to play with! Unsurprisingly, since it is now standard in all phones, the Koi (KX2) supports both SMS and EMS. Adding to that it supports MMS messaging to send all multimedia files! The cell phone comes with a calendar which is very intuitive and Kyocera included a phone book having a contact list capacity of 200.

The text prediction tool exploits the eZiText technology, being a top system for easy using. This cell phone is using the cdma2000 1xRTT technology. It can also be connected to a computer with a cable to transfer data between both systems. We conclude believing the Kyocera Koi (KX2) to be a very attractive companion cell phone and we greatly encourage it to our readers!