First Impressions of the Kyocera SmartPhone

I remember the first time I saw the pdQ Palm phone a few years ago. It was a brick and my first thought was "who would want to carry that around with them?"

The long awaited pdQ II, the Kyocera QCP-6035 known as the Kyocera SmartPhone, was finally released about two months ago. At first glance I was impressed with the size of the phone - It's really not very big considering it is both a Palm and a phone. It is quite thin, and in fact is smaller than the cellphone I carry around with me on a daily basis.

No, this time I wasn't faced with a brick. But I was faced with a very small screen. I realize you can't have it all, but I think they took compact one step too far with this screen. The large font on the phone is smaller than the small font on my III. That is a big difference in readability.

Other than the screen, which definitely jumped out at me, the Kyocera is a nice Palm. It runs OS3.5 in Flash with the posibility of upgrades if Kyocera releases them. It comes with 8MB of RAM, the current standard for Palm devices. It lacks an expansion slot which is fast becoming another standard for Palm devices. Having built-in phone and modem functionality removes some of the need for expansion, but I'd still like to see some way to add additional memory.

The phone has a flip up piece on the bottom - when it's down, the device is a Palm. When it's up, a phone. The flip piece can interfere a little bit with button use, but for the most part I was able to use the buttons effectively. I couldn't handle a rapid fire game but everything else would be fine.

Like many phones, the Kyocera has a jogdial on the left side that controls many of the phone functions. It can also be used to control some Palm applications. It was in a comfortable spot on the device for use with the left thumb.

The Palm and phone are perhaps not as integrated as they could be - approximately 2/3 of the Palm screen is visible in phone mode, enough to show several lines of the address application. Instead the data from the Palm address book is shown in a different, more phone-like application. I found that disconcerting.

Like many of the Palms currently on the market, the Kyocera uses a green inverted backlight. I have said this many time, but it bears repeating: the inverted backlight is not nearly as useable as the regular backlight found in older Palms, the CLIE, and now the HandEra.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic