VirginMobile Kyocera Cyclops short review

Well, well, my funky old $20 phone (which I bought with the intent of it being so cheep it's "disposable") suddenly crashed and entered a reset loop / auto shutoff sequence during my campus tour of the University of Florida. I only bought it about 1.5 years ago and my real usage time on it hadn't even exceeded a year (taken I've had it laying around useless when I was in Taiwan), even for a cheep phone, this life time is kind of short. But oh well, it works very well, had very good reception and never had any problems during it's lifetime. And besides, it really looks like a toy, clearly designed for kids, which makes me kind of ashamed to pull it out in the public. So, it died, just the excuse for me to get a new phone.

Virgin Mobile has worked very well for me. Being a prepaid service, with my very low phone usage, I get to pay only $15/3 month, which averages to just $5/month. Compare that with normal contract based monthly plans at $30 and up, and they always add additional fees and taxes to make you pay $5~10 more each month then what they advertised. Oh, and don't forget that expensive activation fees and stuff upon signing the contract. With all of that adding up, I hate the big greedy telecos, and as shown in Consumer Report's (CR) studies, I am not alone in hating them; CR has rated telecos as one of the services industries that consumers hate the most, high up there in the top 2 with airlines. Also, I get to get about an hours' worth of free minutes every month by watching ads on Virgin's website, keeping my balance above $15 year round. On the service part, reception is always good; and I am very satisfied with their customer service, whenever I get to get a real human rep on the phone. Only down thing with them is that they target kids and teens as their customers, so there's funky/stupid icons, images and ringtones preloaded on phones, and customer service calls start with a stupid automated voice going "hay, what's up" in a strange accent.... Will the goods out weigh the bads, so I'm sticking with them on a prepaid plan.

Nice timing, as Target is selling the Kyocera Cyclops for $39 each, $10 cheeper then elsewhere. And it's a nice flip phone with the largest of all those tiny-screen Virgin phones, so I went to scoop it up.

After reading all those phone reviews on Mobile01 by Ln, I'm starting to like the feel of gadgets in an outdoor setting.

So starting with the packaging...

It's those hard-to-open blister packs. Hard to open by thefts, just as hard for paying customers. Every one except the retailers hate them.


Everything inside. Got the phone, battery (Li-ion, 900mAh which gives the phone pretty reasonable battery life so far. I forgot to take it out of the phone before taking the photo...), travel charger, booklets and ads, and even a neat bag for sending your old phone back for recycling, free of charge.


This charger is much smaller and lighter then my previous one. The plug is collapsible , too.


Here's the phone, with a great one-line outer screen.


Opened


Main screen, with my own wallpaper. The built-in wallpapers were, once again, kid-target hip-hop style and downright horrible. At first I tried to use photos it took with the built-in camera, but the photos are a 4*6 ratio that left the long screen blank on the top and bottom. And besides, photos took with the built-in camera are all pixelated, heavy on noise, out of focus, and (again) downright horrible. It took me a whole afternoon trying to find a way to get my own photos onto the phone, as the for-purchase wallpapers on the Virgin Mobile's website are in the same style of the built-in ones, only worse. I tried all kinds of ways, including websites that put photos on a server for phones to download over the web, emailing it to my own gmail account and accessing Gmail over the phone browser. But turns out the whole download function of the phone browser was disabled by Virgin (hay, I paid a buck for that one day's web access!). In the end I found on the blog that photos can be sent to [my phone number]@vmpix.com , and that email would show up on the phone as a picture message (MMS). Pretty neat, except that each MMS costs a quarter to receive. Also, in the process, I learned that I could send SMS or MMS to any email address from the phone, which would be turned into an email by Virgin's system. SMS uses the [phone number]@vmobl.com address which MMS is @vmpix.com , emails sent to these address converts to SMS/MMS in the same way. A pretty neat way to use email, I like it.

The phone also came with a Java email application that never worked, oh well screw it.


Here's the main menu, with stupid icons. As Cnet's review pointed out, the icon link to view my remaining balance is represented as a piggy bank flying away, (quoting Cnet) "how appropriate"! I know it's again, targeting kids, but I really don't believe kids would appreciate these dumb graphics. Adults tend to guess what kids like and usually screw up.


Close up on the key pad. Buttons are big enough for comfort, but a little shallow on the travel depth of each press. Holding the opened phone to my face was not as comfortable to hold as a larger candy bar, but acceptable.


The Kyocera mark on the battery cover, which is a pain to remove. Oh, it uses the CDMA2000 "3G" network, but only utilizing voice/SMS/MMS and slow speed data services, there's no noticeable difference with 2G in the end user's experience.

Over all, I like it. The size is not the smallest, but small enough. Battery life is pretty nice so far. The 65000 color STN screen at a resolution of 128x160 px, although still tiny, is pretty nice for a budget phone (and all my previous phones are budget phones). The Camera is horrible, the worst in noise that I've ever seen. The menus, wallpaper and ringtones are stupid kid fanfair, but at least the outside looks decent, wallpapers changeable, and there are 2 plain ringtone choices. Overall, it's a very nice budget phone. Until I could get a Japanese high-end phone on my hands and working in the US, I'll be sticking with this baby.


To wrap it up, my old phone, stuck in the Virgin mobile logo of the booting sequence.
Interestingly, my old candy bar phone is just as thick as my new phone but much bigger in length, even without the antenna. To give it last words of condolence, that antenna really give it better reception then the new phone.