Kyocera KX18 User Reviews

My biggest issues with this phone is the battery life STINKS and it requires reading glasses for the display for the +42 yr. old set.
For the money amp'd is a good value.... IF you do not have to port a number over! My bill is much less then when I was with verizon for the same thing more or less. Amp'd customer service is non functioning, the absolute worst.

When I first received my Jet and made my first call, I was stoked on the call quality. It sounded almost like a landline connection with EV-DO, and making and receiving calls was easy and efficient, unlike the Cingular Contract I had just broken out of. I will never go with Cingular again.

Sound Quality: 9/10
Call Quality was almost perfect, very good for bare-bones calling.

Screen Quality: 9/10
Screen was crystal clear with no issues on color or anything.

Speed: 6/10
The phone was sometimes very slow to move through menus, and backing out to the main screen from Amp'd Live took 3+ seconds at times.

Options: 7/10
All the options for ringtones, wallpapers, camera functions are there, with nothing noticably unique.

Camera: 5/10
Camera can take pictures max 640x480. Picture quality is limited and flash is almost useless in any low light situation. Pictures outside were bright though.

Music Quality: 5/10
I'm a major Audiophile, so I need exceedingly good sound quality or I won't use the device. Unfortunately, this phone doesn't deliver with the packaged headphones sounding tinny and dull.

Battery Life: 6/10
I recommend the extended battery. The standard battery gives me 3 days of standby (That is without one single call) and not even an hour or two of talk time. The phone also gets very hot very quickly when talking and can be irretating to use after a short time. The phone charges relatively quickly though.

Speakerphone: 6/10
The speaker is loud.. so loud in fact that the phone warns you that the speaker can get loud enough to damage your hearing. WHY they made it so incredibly loud is beyond me, but at the highest setting the quality of the speaker is significantly reduced and is very difficult to understand others. It also hurts my ears badly.

Usability: 5/10
Unfortunately this phone suffers from crashing and freezing far too many times. Many times the phone would just stop functioning and a hard reset had to be performed. Most menus move through quickly, but the phone theme is limited and somewhat bland.

The speaker volume for some reason can't go silent using the keys on the left and right, nor can you set it to vibrate using those keys. You have to go through a sea of menus just to silence your phone, so in most cases like in Theatres and Restaraunts, I just turn the phone off since it's so much easier and quicker then trying to figure out how to set it to silent mode or vibrate.

When the phone is charging, a bright red LED turns on at the top of the phone and when the charge is completed, it turns green. The LED is excessively bright as well so if your charging the phone at night, you might have to put the phone in a different room to sleep if you are a light sleeper.

Some of the settings are strange on the phone. The phone tends to talk to you a lot when not in use. If an EV-DO signal is lost or gained, the phone's screen will turn on, wasting battery life.

The phone comes with a nice cloth for cleaning the screen but interestingly enough at the time of writing this, it didn't come with any sort of User's Guide at all. Figuring out the features was a trial-and-error session until everything could be figured out.

Amp'd Customer Service: 2/10

Unfortunately most of the people that you get in touch with at customer service don't really know what they are doing yet, and right now their customer service system has a great deal of problems. At one point I couldn't pay my bill for 3 weeks because of a credit card processing error, and when I lost my phone, customer service didn't tell me about my insurance plan or even who to talk to about that.

At the time I couldn't order a new phone so I told them to hold off on it for now and that I just won't pay the bill for a few weeks. However, a week after that conversation, a phone arrived at my door without a memory card. I called to have a memory card ordered, but it never arrived.

I thought "Cool! Free phone!" but I was dead wrong. It took 4 weeks to get the phone activated because nobody had any idea why the phone would not activate (because I hadn't paid for the phone yet..) and I ended up having my number changed to get it working, but it finally worked. 3 weeks later they shut it off for non-payment of the phone. However, when I called to pay for the phone, they said they had no way of billing me for the $99 and that I literally could not pay for the phone. So they told me to send the phone back to them and completely re-order the service.

I got my contract cancelled, but for some reason they never sent me the packaging slip to get this phone sent back, so it's still sitting in its box on my desk, not in use.

UPDATE: I recently talked to them about getting this phone sent back to them and they offered to pay me for the phone up to $50! Wtf? I never paid for the phone in the first place. Oh well, I won't complain. They just have to send me the UPS slip so I can get this phone sent back. Even if they don't give me $50, I don't care. I just want them to take their phone back and leave me to another carrier. I already ordered a phone and service through sprint.

Overall: Bad. I know they are a very new company, but they have an excessive amount of bugs and glitches to fix in their phones and in their service. Maybe I'll try with them again after my 2 year sprint contract ends. Their calling plans are cheaper and give me far more minutes then sprint, but it doesn't mean anything if the phone doesn't work. Hopefully by then they get their stuff straightened out.

Better luck next time Amp'd!

Pros:
Small, looks cool, high resolution & contrast, intense graphics, acceptable photo/video camera.

Cons:
Weak battery, malfunctioning music player, annoying Live portal browser, web browsing is difficult because of unconfigurably large fonts, weak tech suppor

The phone's form factor is small, relatively resistant to easy scratching, and generally.. cool. The slide up function is smooth and affects a slight "Matrix"(as in, "red or blue pill") appeal when it locks into place. Physically speaking, it is a nice vacation from the standard snap-open phones on the market.

As of early February, the Amp'd Live portal is still in a relatively new state, and requires a strong EVDO signal for even basic access. Unfortunately, my signal constantly drops in & out in the Northern VA/DC area, which prevents me from accessing the portal at all. Although the manual says that you can preview content, there appears to be no real ability to do so without paying for it first. Although the portal has several content channels, they are limited mostly to small video clips, trailers and "radio popular" music. Channel surfing is extremely annoying because you're stuck hearing music and channel intro's over & over. Web browsing is fast, but difficult because of the unconfigurably large font sizes.

I have acquired a large collection of digital music over the years and found the ability to copy MP3's to the MicroSD card quite enticing. Unfortunately, the music player refuses to play music once you use the
song controls(pause, rewind, etc..). Power cycling the phone was the only way to unfreeze the player, and even then it would only play if I let it go synchronously through the whole list without pausing or stopping it at all. Tech support's only solution was for me to purchase music through the Live portal. This was obviously not an acceptible solution. If they ever fix this, keep in mind that you're limited to the size of the MicroSD card. So far I haven't been able to find any above 512MB, although 1GB was recently announced by Sandisk.

The default battery is very weak, and needed at least two chargings in a 24 hour period without heavy usage. It has a screen lock feature to prevent accidental calls, but the interface still responds to button presses by flashing it's lights and waking up the screensaver. The lights also flash when it loses & gains back it's EVDO signal resulting in additional battery burn. Amp'd offers a battery upgrade, but I have not tested it.

Voice reception is fine and the speaker is LOUD. Ringtone volume ranges between loud and extremely loud, and I was often forced to keep it on vibrate to avoid throwing people into shock. Basic features like assigning pre-included pictures to contacts often resulted in errors such as "File is corrupt". Power cycling the phone sometimes fixed this, however. The video recorder frequently locks up when you stop, however the recording remains intact after forcing an exit.

The Amp'd tech support and CSR were often nice, but their solutions were always limited to things such as: reset the phone with a * numeric code, power cycle the phone, take the battery out for a few minutes, reformat your MicroSD card. Most of these worked only temporarily. Reformatting the MicroSD card becomes an annoyance if you keep files on it.

Overall the phone and it's service could be great, and I would be willing to lock myself into an 18 month contract if only the marketable features actually worked. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for
being so new, but they have some serious bugs that need to be ironed out. Unfortunately, their tech support didn't give me confidence that this would happen. Thus, I'll be returning my phone. Luckily I'm still within the buyer's remorse period.