Mediocre phone bricked by mandatory update
I'll start off by saying that this phone is currently useless due to an OTA update forced by KYOCERA. I'll go into more detail at the end of the review.
I'm on FirstNet (AT&T) but at least the fatal issues have been documented with other carriers.
Overall the hardware isn't too bad. Certainly not a premium phone, but it survived some pretty good falls. Screen and camera cover scratch resistance are actually excellent. Performance is just barely adequate for current versions of android, and only if you have lowish standards. The "watertight" covers on the USB, 3.5mm, and SIM/SD seem to work, but take some fiddling to seat properly and I never really felt like I could trust them. The vibrator is weak and annoying. Screen is OK. Camera is terrible. Absolutely awful. Belongs in a flip phone from 2010. Don't let the MP rating fool you, it's so bad it's kind of impressive. Also, if the phone is kept in cargo pants, the camera will randomly launch and take literally hundreds of photos.
The software is embarrassing. At first it just feels like a really stock android with no bells and whistles whatsoever. But it is so buggy, you will run into issues literally every day. Not usually complete failures (it crashes every week or two), just things that are incredibly annoying and could easily have been avoided with some basic testing/debugging.
-Audio volume control is very granular at the low end. Analogous to going from .5 to 3.0 on a scale of 1-10 in one step.
-During phone calls, proximity sensor turns screen ON rather than OFF. Even if you manually turn the screen off with the power button, putting the phone to your ear will turn the screen on. No amount of fiddling with settings fixes the problem.
-Proximity sensors randomly disable the screen while you're using it.
-SD card accessing is unreliable and extremely slow. It literally takes 60-90 seconds for a taken photo to be available for review, and the gallery is essentially useless (SD card tested and fully functional in any other device).
-Bluetooth is unreliable. It will simply refuse to stay connected to some devices for longer than 1-2 seconds, rendering them completely useless (also tested to be functional with multiple other devices).
-Quick access menu for settings only allows functions to be switched on/off, tapping on labels simply toggles function rather than accessing relevant settings menu.
-If you swipe the Quick Access menu down from the lock screen, navigation buttons disappear and it takes swiping up on an unmarked, and very small spot to get out of it.
-Booting to Safe Mode often fails.
-Innumerable other issues that aren't coming to mind.
And now for the fatal issues. With the latest forced OTA update from KYOCERA, the phone would repeatedly connect and disconnect from the cell network for 5-10 minutes until it crashed and would reboot to the recovery menu. Nothing helped, removing SIM, booting into Safe Mode, Airplane Mode, nothing. I would have to repeat this cycle 5-15 times, and it would randomly boot and connect properly. And things would be good (as good as they could be) until the next time it froze up and required a reboot.
This went on for several months, and upon further research I found that I was actually one of the lucky ones and that most people were unable to ever get there phone to function at all after the update. Of course being a cheapskate I held off on buying a phone that actually worked until this thing joined the bricked horde and left me high and dry.
Oh, and sending one of these in to KYOCERA for warranty work will get you a brand new one with a previous version of android. Works great until it connects and catches wind of the update and bricks itself without your consent. I've heard there may be a class action against KYOCERA.
So I spent less than the list price of this device on an open box Galaxy A51 5G and a SupCase, and the thing doesn't absolutely suck. Highly recommend.Read full review
Verified purchase: No
