Gadgetory

hi this is Nate Roth with Cena and today we're checking out the Kyocera hydro icon it's $150 smartphone available from Boost Mobile and it's notable because it's built to military grade specifications so the icon doesn't necessarily look like a foam but especially rugged it isn't covered in a giant plastic case and it isn't incredibly thick or anything like that but it's actually water resistant up to 1 meter about 3 feet and it's shockproof and dustproof and it's actually a pretty sturdy device under the hood is a 1.2 gigahertz quad-core processor it's not the fastest CPU on the block by any means but it's actually pretty decent I tried a bunch of pretty hardware intensive games and they all ran fairly well which isn't bad for a phone that's $150 without a contract inside you'll find eight gigs total of internal storage space but only about 4 gigs are actually accessible to the user so you're going to want to get a micro SD card the phone can support up to 32 gigs of expandable storage so the icon is two cameras there's a two megapixel shooter on the front and an eight megapixel camera on the rear it's not a great camera but it's not terrible if you've got you know a steady object that you want to shoot and you've got nice lighting you can get some decent pictures out of it where the phone does fall flat however is on call quality and data speed the icon runs on boost mobile and Boost Mobile doesn't actually offer its 4G LTE service in San Francisco proper you're going to look further out into the Bay Area that means here in San Francisco you're going to be stuck on 3G which is pretty slow for things like downloading apps or uploading photos to social networks the phone also struggles with call quality now when I called people I could generally hear them rather fine we'll get to hearing them in a moment but when I spoke to people I would often get complaints about echoing or sounding like I was at the bottom of a wall which is kind of unfortunate but as for actually hearing people Kyocera has been in baking something rather interesting into their phones they're calling it the smart sonic receiver if you look at the top of the phone you'll notice there's no traditional speaker for you to place your arrogance and that's because built into the phone right at the top here is a transceiver that actually pumps vibrations through the hard cartilage in your ear and that makes things sound incredibly clear unfortunately that means that you're here you're going to hear every crackle hiss and pop of boots Mobile's Network which isn't exactly an optimal experience as with most smartphones you're gonna want to check the coverage area before you buy in so what about that military grade rating well it works and by that I mean you can dunk the phone into a bucket of water and it'll continue to function now there are caveats of course if any water gets under the back plate somehow then the phone is going to be destroyed no matter what but it forms a really nice tight seal and it shouldn't be problematic if you're careful with your phone so now we get to the ultimate question who is this phone for well at $150 it's not very expensive at all and there's no contract Boost Mobile plans start at $40 it ended 60 and that gets you unlimited data at 4g LTE speeds of course that LTE coverage isn't going to mean much if you live in an area that boost mobile network simply doesn't reach I'm Nate Ralph you can read the rest of the review on TNS thanks for watching