.KEYWORD kyocera
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Kyocera 7135 smartphone beats the competition
.FEATURE
.SUMMARY If you carry a phone and a Palm OS organizer but never considered combining them, it could be time. The latest hybrids have shed weight, added bright color screens, and found better ways to integrate telephone and PDA functionality. Of all the new smartphones hitting the market, Barton Gellman believes the Kyocera 7135 is the best of the bunch. In this review he’ll tell you why.
.AUTHOR Barton Gellman
If you carry a phone and a Palm OS organizer but never considered combining them, it could be time. The latest hybrids have shed weight, added bright color screens, and found better ways to integrate telephone and PDA functionality. The best of these so-called smartphones make very few compromises, and they do things you cannot do with separate devices. The top choice, for my money, is the Kyocera 7135 (at http://www.kyocera-wireless.com/7100_phone/7100_phone_series.htm).
I was grudgingly fond of Kyocera’s previous offering, the 6035, despite its heft (half a pound) and murky black-and-white screen. I’m a newspaper reporter and want my address book, calendar, and notes with me just about all the time. Even a big smartphone puts a welcome end to awkward juggling of PDA, phone, and paper notebook in a typical call.
The new Kyocera model is not a matchbook. Someone who doesn’t always need a PDA and prefers the kind of phone that slips under a cocktail dress (that would be Jenna Elfman in Keeping the Faith), will not want this. But it is a considerable improvement on its forbears (see Figure A), and not conspicuous in a pocket or against your ear.
.FIGPAIR A The Kyocera 7135 (right) is much smaller and lighter than its predecessor, the 6035.
The marketers call phones like these "converged devices." Some people compare them to Swiss Army knives, but the analogy is misleading. Smartphones don’t just package existing tools. They create a new tool, capable of tasks that could not be done before.
.BREAK_EMAIL Click to read more about this slick little phone.
I have no idea how I functioned without pocket email. Wireless Web access can also be priceless. Consider: a Google search in the taxi en route to a meeting for which you are missing one key fact. You can update Vindigo, even add a new city, wirelessly. You can check traffic and flight delays, find concert times, or look up a lawyer’s biography on Martindale Hubbell. These are not fanciful examples. I’ve used them all. Of course, there is touch-and-dial access to your whole address book. Mine has 2,246 entries.
Two strong contenders now contest the smartphone market: Kyocera’s 7135 and Handspring’s twin Treo models. The Treo 270 is for networks, like T-Mobile, which use a standard called GSM. The Treo 300 is for networks like Sprint, which use the CDMA standard. Palm’s Tungsten W, to my mind, does not belong in this category. Anything without a speaker, requiring a headset for voice service, should not be considered an everyday telephone.
I think Kyocera has the superior product. There are five main differences between the 7135 and the Treo (see Figure B), four of which are clear advantages for the former.
.FIGPAIR B The Treo is even smaller and uses GSM or CDMA networks.
The fifth difference–thumb-keyboard versus Graffiti text entry–is a matter of preference, but it may be very important to you.
There is one flaw common to both smartphones. Both vendors need to address it in a firmware upgrade. I’ll go into that later.
.H1 Kyocera vs. Treo: the differences
Let’s take a look at the differences that separate the Kyocera 7135 from the Treo devices.
.H2 User-changeable battery
The Kyocera device has a user-changeable battery. The Treo devices don’t. I like to carry a spare, so I can count on power during my heaviest days of phone use–usually the days when I need the phone most. If you run out of juice with a Treo, you’re out of luck until you get to a charger.
.H2 Memory card slot
It’s the same story when it comes to a memory card slot. Kyocera has it (see Figure C), Treo does not.
.FIGPAIR C It’s hard to see, but the memory card slot is at the bottom of the right side.
There are plenty of reasons to want plug-in memory (to carry a lot of files, or to add hardware such as a digital camera), but the business-essential reason is backup. The Kyocera 7135 comes with the free version of BackupBuddyVFS (at http://www.bluenomad.com/bbvfs/prod_bbvfs_details.html), which I set to run daily at 2 a.m. If I have a disastrous data loss, I can restore everything without returning to my desktop computer.
.H2 Analog phone service, along with digital
The Treo devices each run on two digital frequencies. The Kyocera 7135 does that too, but it can also place and receive calls using the older analog networks that still reach places outside digital range. With the Kyocera I had few gaps in service in a drive through California’s wine country and along the coast. The Treo lost its signal much more often.
Combine these first three points and you have something basic: the phone works when you need it. The value of reliability–power, a phone signal, and data integrity–is hard to overstate.
.H2 MP3 player
The Kyocera has an MP3 player built in. Granted, it’s a luxury, but it’s certainly welcome on plane rides and in waiting rooms.
.H2 Keyboard
Some consumers will care about the keyboard a lot. There is room for only one physical keypad on a hybrid phone. Handspring chose a Blackberry-style thumb-board for text entry (see Figure D).
.FIGPAIR D For some users the Treo keyboard is a decisive advantage.
Kyocera chose a standard telephone pad. My friend Walter Mossberg at The Wall Street Journal gives this so much weight that he prefers the Treo. I disagree. Personally, I would rather have a phone with real buttons. When I have to write more than a few sentences, I use the folding Stowaway keyboard (see Figure E) that Kyocera licensed from Think Outside (at http://www.thinkoutside.com).
.FIGPAIR E Kyocera licensed the excellent Stowaway folding keyboard.
.H1 The hardware
The Kyocer 7135 weighs 6.6 oz. and is 4 x 2.4 x 1.2 inches when closed. It’s bigger than most new mobile phones, but smaller than any combination of separate phone and Palm handheld. The Treo is slightly smaller and lighter still.
The hardware feels solid and comfortable in the hand. It’s made from injection-molded plastic with a brushed aluminum swoosh. Mine has survived three accidental falls from belt-height to a hard surface. Don’t even ask.
When closed, the case protects the screen. The flip opens smoothly and locks at about 150 degrees, but it will stay in place anywhere past about 90 degrees.
The screen is the standard 160 x 160 pixel resolution of most Palm OS devices, not the 320 x 320 or 320 x 480 of the more recent Palm and Sony models. The screen is bright and crisp, with well-saturated 16-bit color. The Treos use 12-bit color. They look good, but not quite as good.
Except in bright daylight, the Kyocera 7135 screen is a pleasure to read, even with the backlight set at minimum brightness, which helps conserve battery life. The Kyocera 7135 screen is close to the size of a Palm m130 screen, slightly smaller than most other Palm OS organizers.
The device comes with 16MB of onboard memory, a Dragonball VZ chip running at 33 MHz, and a modified version of Palm OS 4.1. The modifications integrate the Palm OS functions and the phone. The device will not be upgradeable to OS 5. The expansion slot can accommodate a memory card of any capacity using the SD or MMC standard. Cards of 512MB are commonly available, and 1 GB cards have been announced. There is a standard called SDIO for add-on hardware, but support for it is not a simple yes-or-no. Kyocera updated its firmware to support the Veo Traveler camera and is likely to do so for other devices if need be.
An earbud-microphone is standard. The optional stereo headset, which incorporates a microphone, is a big plus. Twin earbuds make full use of the built-in MP3 player, the sound of which compares well to standalone players I have used. One important limit: the chip cannot keep up with music encoded at more than 128 bits. Playing music is surprisingly easy on power. Two hours at high volume left the battery three-quarters full, with the phone on standby.
The desktop cradle has room to charge a spare battery and comes standard with serial and USB connectors. The tiny AC power supply is detachable from the cradle and has folding prongs, so it travels well.
Gone is the jog dial of the Kyocera 6035, which I liked. The Kyocera 7135 has an "OK" button between the up and down rockers at the center of the four standard Palm hardware buttons. In addition to number keys, dial, and hang up, the phone pad has a "clear" button, a speakerphone toggle, and a button to power off the PDA. If you hold the power button, it turns off backlighting.
The keypad is not good, a surprise in an otherwise classy package. To keep the phone’s thickness down, the keys were placed nearly flush to their base. They barely travel and give little tactile feedback. I find I have to slow down and exaggerate my key presses on voicemail systems to avoid mistakes. Dial and hang up keys are the same size and shape as all the rest, which makes them hard to find by touch.
Up and down buttons on the side of the phone (see Figure F) adjust loudness for the ringer or the earpiece.
.FIGPAIR F Up and down buttons on the left side control ringer and speaker volume, but not music
Unhappily, they don’t control volume on the MP3 music player. Holding "down" for a few seconds turns off all sounds on the phone and the PDA, including alarms on the organizer; "up" reverses that. When sound is off, phone calls and alarms vibrate.
The Graffiti area is on the bottom half of the phone while the main screen is on the flip. My only complaint here is that the Graffiti area cannot be set to stay lighted at night. It lights with the phone keys, which can be illuminated for the first 10 or 30 seconds after dialing, or during a call, but not otherwise.
The infrared port is functional but anemic, with range of around two feet.
.H1 The phone
The Kyocera 7135 is a tri-mode CDMA phone, which means it is capable of running on Verizon, Sprint, and Alltel networks, among others, and offers analog service when digital is not available. It doesn’t work overseas. If you do a lot of international travel, the Treo 270 runs fine on the GSM networks of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
The phone is equipped for high-speed data networks, such as Verizon’s recently introduced Express Net. These connections are advertised at "up to" 153 kbps, a speed not actually available on Earth. During PDA use, the modest processing power of the Motorola chip appears to be a bottleneck. My tests with Eudora email and wireless synchronization to AvantGo worked three to four times faster than the usual 14.4 kbps connection, for throughput in perhaps the high 40s. When the phone is used for a wireless connection to a desktop or laptop computer, Express Net is said to be considerably faster. I did not test it that way.
Caller ID can be set to display the name of any caller in your Address Book, or just the number. A small liquid crystal display on top of the phone (see Figure G) shows the same information without requiring you to open the flip. When no call is active, the LCD displays time, battery, and signal strength.
.FIGPAIR G A small LCD atop the phone displays Caller ID or battery, signal strength, and time.
You can set the phone to vibrate, vibrate then ring, or simply ring. There are many polyphonic ringers built in, including the national anthem, reggae and horror film tunes, Space Cowboy, Fur Elise, and plenty of geeky tech sounds. Let’s not get out of hand with this feature, people.
Battery life is advertised as 3.2 hours of digital talk time or 120 hours of standby. I measured real-world performance with a Palm OS application called Runtime (at http://home.arcor.de/uwe.klimmek/manual.html). Brightness was set at medium and the infrared port left on. I pulled out the device as I needed it, which that day included much more standby than talk and plenty of organizer use. There were brief periods (such as in the subway) when the phone used extra power to search for a digital signal. The first low-battery warning came after 24 hours of telephone standby, 25 minutes of talk time, and 5 hours 10 minutes of PDA use. The device went dead at 36 hours standby, 25 minutes talk, and 6 hours 2 minutes of PDA use. Data remained intact after recharging.
Normally I husband power by dropping brightness to minimum, disabling infrared, and setting the phone to switch off automatically for six hours each night. Even so, I have had a few days of heavy phone use on the road in which the battery did not last from morning to night. Hence the spare battery.
The hardware supports enhanced location services, if phone carriers ever get around to offering them. Mandated by law and overdue, those services will transmit the phone’s position to 911 emergency operators. The same technology would enable carriers to make commercial offerings based on where you are, including, God forbid, "push" text enticing you to a nearby store. A user setting lets you keep your location private, except during emergency calls. All this, for the moment, is strictly hypothetical.
The phone stores up to 99 speed dials and 30 voice-activated phone numbers. Voice dialing works well. If used with a speaker and external power, as in a car kit, you may choose to answer the ringing phone by saying "yes" or "no." One thing for the wish list: a "redial last number" voice command.
An included Message application (see Figure H) handles text competently, sending and receiving by short messaging service, or SMS, or by standard email. The "canned text" choices can be edited.
.FIG H The Message application handles text competently but can take other functions hostage.
.H1 Software
Kyocera has tweaked the Address Book so that tapping a number dials it. Tapping an email address launches the built-in Eudora mailer. You can dial a phone number from any application (Memo Pad, for example) by selecting the number and tapping the Dialer silkscreen.
The Memo Pad is also improved, with a color sketch pad and a two-minute voice memo available (see Figure I).
.FIG I The improved Memo Pad offers voice and color sketch options.
The Memo Pad graphics include color and line controls, as shown in Figure J.
.FIG J Memo Pad graphics include color and line controls.
Pressing and holding the Memo hardware key starts a voice recording. It is a pity that Kyocera did not enable this function to record phone calls. The two-minute limit on voice memos is fixed, storing the sound in a separate chip. You cannot record onto the SD card or transfer recordings to a desktop computer. See Figure K.
.FIG K The Voice Memo can be up to two minutes.
Music playback is controlled by rudimentary Jukebox software see Figure L)
.FIG L Music fidelity is quite good, but the Jukebox software is rudimentary.
Fidelity is quite good, but the software does no more than adjust volume and balance. It cannot save playlists, change the play order, or mark a spot to resume play, which is important when listening to audio books. There is a workaround: tap the Dialer silkscreen, which activates the phone, and MP3 play will stop. When you return to Jukebox it will begin play where it left off. Kyocera’s software development kit includes access to the MP3 hardware, and I hope someone writes a better front end. Because it controls a separate chip set, Jukebox is among the few applications that work in the background. You can start a song and keep listening while you read a novel or add tasks to your To Do list, etc.
Kyocera tells you to transfer music files to the SD card by way of the cradle, with included Downloader software. This is a painfully slow process. I had trouble with the USB connection, though this was no fault of the phone’s. Using the serial port, it took 64 minutes–that is not a typo–to transfer a single song of 3.9MB to the card. Worse, when a phone call interrupted the transfer, I had to start over.
The USB connection is faster, but not vastly so, because the phone’s processor and card-writing hardware cannot keep up with USB data transfer rates. Some people report a maximum rate of about 1MB a minute, which means over two hours to fill a 128MB card. If you plan to add much data–music, photos, or anything else–you will certainly want to buy a small card-writer to attach to your computer’s USB port. At a cost of about $50, these devices mount your memory card as a disk drive in Windows. In my test it transferred a 4MB song in 4 seconds and filled the 128MB card in under 2 minutes.
Tip: the music player will find songs only if they are in the card’s \//Audio folder. For transfer to and from a digital camera, JPEG images need to be in a directory called \//DCIM. To put applications or data files where the Palm OS can see them, use the \//Palm/Launcher subdirectory.
Firmware may vary somewhat by carrier. My test phone, activated on Verizon, came with multiple browsers–Eudora Web, Blazer, the EIS Browser, and Open Wave’s WAP browser.
Included email clients were Eudora and Mobile Mail. Eudora has the virtue of working fine with the flip closed. I like to tell it to check mail, close the phone, return it to the holster, and pull it out again in a minute or two. Other communications tasks, like AvantGo synchronizing, cut short if you close the flip.
The Palm operating system’s generic File Manager (see Figure M) is included for basic copy and delete operations between onboard memory and the memory card.
.FIG M The included File Manager can copy, move, and delete files.
The File Manager is slow and thin on features. A third-party alternative, such as the freeware Filez (at http://nosleepsoftware.sourceforge.net), is worth adding.
As noted, backup software comes with the Kyocera smartphone. It works exactly as intended. I recently had a mysterious hard reset just as I climbed into a taxi for a lunch date. I restored the Date Book first, in a matter of seconds, to check where I was going. Then I restored the whole Palm OS organizer, which took about 25 minutes.
Also included are PhotoSuite (see Figure N) and a sampling of games, including Tetris.
.FIG N The included PhotoSuite can convert and display JPEG, BMP, and AVI media.
There are a great many user-changeable preferences. You can set the Dialer to launch each time the flip is opened (see Figure O), which means the device always opens as a phone and not a Palm OS organizer.
.FIG O You can decide what the phone does when you open the flip.
You can also choose to use the flip to answer and hang up from calls. You have a choice of silence or one of many sounds when opening the flip. I fear that way too many people will choose the "Dolphin" sound, which resembles Captain Kirk’s communicator. Try to resist.
An unfortunate omission, from my point of view, is the native Expense application that has come with nearly every Palm OS organizer. Kyocera decided not to buy a license. Many companies, including mine, have custom spreadsheets linked to the native Expense database, and I am very sorry to lose that convenience. I know of no third-party application that uses the same data format.
The included phone software does not allow a user to clear the database of Recent Calls. This is a security concern for me, since I use confidential sources and don’t want their names to be found in a log if I leave the phone in some government office. I work around the problem by using Filez to delete the KWC_RecentCallsDB and KWC-CallHistoryDB when I need to.
.H1 Integrating the phone and PDA
In general, the integration of phone and organizer is remarkably good. This was no small task for Kyocera engineers, since there are separate chipsets for the phone, the organizer, the voice recorder, and the MP3 decoder.
You can use most applications during a voice phone call, either by switching on the speakerphone or plugging in the headset. It’s easy, for instance, to put a new appointment in your Date Book as you talk. Any time the Dialer is active, though, MP3 music play will stop.
During a data call you can use an external keyboard hooked to the HotSync port to reply to email or fill in a Web form.
The complex handoffs between organizer and phone sometimes lead to annoying delays. It may take 10 or 15 seconds before you can answer the phone, depending what the organizer is doing when the call arrives. That leaves you unsure whether you actually pressed the "Answer Call" button. If you press it twice, you mute the call when it finally answers. Until I figured that out I kept finding myself in a burlesque of the Verizon commercial: "Can you hear me now?" "Can you hear me now?" "Hello?"
.H1 A mind of its own
There is one problem shared by both the Kyocera and Treo smartphones. It’s a design choice that occasionally makes it hard to use either phone or organizer for minutes at a time. Both companies chose to invoke the Palm OS Attention Manager (a routine available to programmers) each time a wireless network tells the phone that a text message or voice mail is waiting. The results are far from ideal.
During the few seconds it takes to receive each incoming message, the phone stops what it is doing without showing why. Then the screen pops up a notification that holds other functions hostage until you dismiss it. For instance, the notification stops email retrieval, causes HotSync operations to fail, and covers whatever was previously on the display. Some people need instant notification, if they’re using the phone as a pager. But for others, it is annoying or worse.
There is no way to turn the function off. There ought to be–either as a default setting or on the notification screen. Right now it offers choices of "OK" or "Go To" for each message. It should add, "Disable Alerts." There are reports that Kyocera may offer such a choice in a firmware upgrade.
This flaw becomes potentially dangerous in an emergency. Multiple notifications are displayed in sequence and override anything else you try to do. There is usually a brief gap between messages, so if you are quick you can squeeze off a speed dial. But when there are eight or ten SMS messages and a voicemail waiting, minutes pass before you have anything like full control of the phone. If notifications cannot be made less obtrusive, Kyocera really has to offer a way to disable them.
.H1 In summary
The Kyocera Smartphone 7135 may be the most valuable productivity tool I own, after the desktop computer. I would not part with it for any available alternative. It is the first no-compromise hybrid phone and organizer, with full-featured telephony, a bright color screen, and hardware features (replaceable battery, expansion slot) that offer exceptional reliability on the road. It has its flaws–a substandard keypad and aggravating delays when text and voice messages arrive from the wireless network–but Kyocera’s offering is the clear winner among a new generation of smartphones. Two kinds of consumers should consider a Handspring Treo instead: heavy email users who want a Blackberry-like thumb-board, and travelers who need to use the telephone overseas.
.RATING 4
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Palm handhelds, visit http://www.palm.com.
For more information on the Kyocera 7135, visit http://www.kyocera-wireless.com/7100_phone/7100_phone_series.htm.
For more information on BackupBuddyVFS, visit http://www.bluenomad.com/bbvfs/prod_bbvfs_details.html.
For more information on the Stowaway keyboard from Think Outside, visit http://www.thinkoutside.com.
For more information on Runtime, visit http://home.arcor.de/uwe.klimmek/manual.html.
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.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Barton Gellman is a special projects reporter for The Washington Post, following tours as diplomatic correspondent, Jerusalem bureau chief, Pentagon correspondent and D.C. Superior Court reporter. His home page is http://www.washingtonpost.com/bartongellman.
