Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from pocketnow.com and this is the hardware review of the Kyocera echo dual screened Android phone let's get to it so it's very exciting not only for you guys but for us to be able to look at and see a dual screen Android phone come out for a while it has seemed like most phones have been the same they're slate devices with similar specs similar fields and and an aesthetics and it's finally great to see a phone come out that is just entirely different that represents a true first for the industry the first dual screened Android phone whether it makes sense we're gonna help you decide that for yourself but in this video we're going to talk about the hardware what's inside how to operate the phone in terms of whether you can flip open the second screen with one hand if you need to and talk about the ergonomics of the phone in your head okay so first let's talk about some accessories that come with the echo you might remember that we got this thing in the box which contained a screen cleaner inside and we thought that maybe this was some sort of case but as you can tell there's no way this could possibly be a case it seems to be just an extra it's almost like a business card holder kind of just an extra thing they include and they include a screen cleaner because you've got two times the number of screens to keep clean so you're gonna want to keep that handy or at least you know polish the screen a little bit with a soft t-shirt because the screen gets really dirty really easily as you're gonna see in the in the course of this video now something else you get is a second charger you know it's interesting at the Kyocera events back in February 2011 the guys from Kyocera were talking about this phone they were talking about how this phone with two screens is going to eat up a lot of battery power and we were thinking well are they gonna tell us about some new battery technology that they that they're releasing with this phone and no they were just going to talk about how they're adding a second battery to the box of the Kyocera echo which is kind of cheating but naturally with two displays you're going to eat up a lot of juice a display is what uses the most amount of battery in any phone so with two screens you're really gonna run low quickly so they include this charger just pop this in its 1370 milliamp hours just like the battery that comes in the echo obviously you've got a couple of charging options here and this way you can reduce the chances that you're going to be running out of juice in the middle of the day now how is battery life well it's actually not that bad if you leave on automatic screen brightness but you may not want to do that because the automatic screen brightness setting on this device makes the screen very very dim if you turn off automatic screen brightness and just get a little bit of extra brightness so you can actually see what you're doing battery life goes down fast I'm talking 2% every minute it's really ridiculous so most people are going to keep this on the the automatic screen brightness settings so that they don't have to swap the batteries okay so let's talk about this device I don't think that anyone would say that this is a good looking device it looks kind of rugged it looks kind of asymmetrical we've got a thin bezel on the left side and a thick bezel on the right side the reason there's the thin bezel on the left side you're gonna see when we pop out the second screen is to reduce the little bezel between the two screens so that they kind of flow together and appear kind of like a tablet display and it kind of works out that way although there's always that black bar there that seems kind of weird but you get used to it we've got a set of Android buttons here and another set of Android buttons on the other display the way that you know which ones are active is that the active buttons will illuminate so it's pretty easy in that respect we've got a sprint logo up here with two chrome accents over on the back we've got a Kyocera logo we've got a 5 megapixel camera LED flash and a self-portrait mirror haven't seen one of those in a while a really loud speaker which provides a lot of volume we can pop off the back if we put a little pressure here and we get the battery back here the 13 70 milliamp hour battery now let's talk about what's inside we've got a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1 gigahertz processor one of the newest ones it's not dual-core but this device is actually pretty fast it's also about 512 megabytes of RAM it has about 500 megabytes of ROM storage built on on the actual device but then you get the 8 gigabyte chip that comes in the box that's a class 4 card so you get a little bit extra storage there let's turn over to the side of the device we've got a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and kind of an awkwardly placed power switch then here's the volume rocker the micro USB charger and sync port really nothing else around the device if you look at this from the profile the sort of ugliness continues again I don't think anyone would call this a smell sleek sexy device it's just it's not it's thick it looks squarish it's a box but that's okay what's really important about this device are the two screens now both screens have the same resolution 800 down by 480 across 3.5 inch diagonal now because each of these displays have WVGA resolution in a 3.5 inch screen size the pixels are very very small a lot smaller than say an Evo or a Desire HD which packs the same amount of pixels in a 4.3 inch display which means that text on the screen is very very crisp if you put these two displays together you get 960 by 800 resolution which is higher than the iPhone you're getting a lot of pixels there you're even starting to rival the amount of pixels you get on a tablet most tablets have 1024 by 768 resolution again on this you're getting 960 by 800 so you're getting close so this idea that the Kyocera echo is kind of a tablet kind of a phone sort of makes sense in that respect okay so let's talk about how you actually use this thing unfortunately it's very difficult to open up the second screen with one hand I can try but you want to make sure that you're over carpet when you do this because you might drop it okay so there we go it just popped open and I'm going to turn off the screen here to reduce the glare so there are two positions that you can put the echo into this is the first position which is really great when you're typing an email or something because as you're gonna see if we go into the Android Market or something and we pull up the keyboard we get a keyboard a full very large keyboard on the bottom there so you have an HTC Touch pro2 like tilting screen here but the biggest problem with that is that now if you tap on the screen because it's not locked in place it's kind of move and wiggle all the time so most people are going to revert to the second position and by the way you just saw me try to touch these Android buttons here but it is the it are these it are these I should have at that part out it is these that are illuminated I'm not gonna edit that out actually so that's how you know which buttons to press so the second position is you put the screen flat and then you push them together and then you get the kind of thin bezel as you can see both of these have a thin bezel where they touch but it's not that thin when you put it together alright let's go to a website like pocket now and you'll notice that it does get kind of weird seeing a thick black line but it's definitely something you get used to now when you're done in this view and you want to put the phone back together so you can actually fit it into your pocket again it's a little bit awkward you can't do it with one hand or at least I haven't been able to after a day or two of practice what you have to do is pop it out use a little bit of a little bit of elbow grease to push it back over now this hinge so far is proving to be pretty strong obviously Kyocera made sure that this hinge could withstand a lot of abuse because people were going to be flipping it around many many times per day and so far so good it looks to be a really robust hinge that locks into place although again it would be nice if it locked in this tilting position it just kind of hangs there but most people will put it into the sort of tablet mode to be able to access it with both screens sort of facing you in the same direction so let's put it back and of course when you put it back on top it's going to go back into just the standard Android configuration and now you're looking at one screen and finally a note on build quality how does this feel on the head it actually feels quite good it is boxy it does feel a little bit awkward in a day when you've got devices with rounded edges and you've got devices with the soft touch plastic on the back but it's not too bad actually it's got a lot of weight to it which might be one of the reasons why feels high-quality we give Kyocera high marks in terms of build quality there's not really much metal to speak of except if you look at the hinge I'm sure there's some metal involved there you have plastic here plastic up here the screen seems to be glass pretty sure it's glass there so pretty good build quality the only thing we really wish about this device in terms of hardware's that Kyocera spent more time to make this a good looking device we wish that they made a thinner and we wish that they had made it easier to slide out the second display because right now it's it's just awkward and it takes a lot of practice to get used to so that was the hardware review of the Kyocera echo we've got another video coming up which will explain exactly how the dual screen configuration works how you get one app on one screen and one app on the other what happens when when a program stretches the app across both displays and a lot more if you like this video please give this a thumbs up and if there's something specific you want to see in our coverage of the Kyocera echo drop us a comment and let us know thanks for watching that's it for now