A basic, keyboard-equipped budget
smartphone, the Kyocera Rise (priced at just $20 with a two-year contract from
Sprint after a mail-in rebate) runs Android 4.0, has a simple design and basic
hardware, and doesn’t excel in any particular category. But you can’t beat the
price, and the Rise is a solid option for a newbie to smartphones.
The Rise’s weight (5.54 ounces) is a little
heavy for a phone with a mostly plastic body. But at 4.44 inches tall by 2.38
inches wide by 0.56 inch thick, the phone manages to feel compact. (It may be
too small for larger hands.)
Kyocera
Rise
A 3.5-inch touchscreen display takes up
most of the Rise’s face. With a resolution of 320 by 480 pixels, the screen
won’t dazzle you: Text wasn’t as crisp as I would have liked, though it was
still readable. In the plus side, the display was quite responsive. When you
select icons or a letter key, the Rise vibrates in the spot that you touched.
The phone’s construction isn’t fantastic,
but it should hold up over time.
A Micro-USB port sits on the left edge,
just below the volume controls. The phone’s top edge hosts the power button and
a headphone jack.
When you slide out the when QWERTY keyboard
from the bottom, the display reorients to landscape orientation. The keyboard
is cramped. Try it before buying the phone.
You can opt to use the Rise’s touchscreen
keyboard instead, but the small screen makes it rather hard to use. Swipe is
the phone’s default touch keyboard, but the settings let you switch to a
standard Android 4.0 keyboard.
The Rise comes configured with a 1GHz
Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8655 single-core processor, which mostly kept the phone
running smoothly. General navigation, application launching, and switching
between apps worked seamlessly, but occasionally the processor seemed to have
trouble keeping up.
I noticed a significant lag switching from
land-scape to portrait orientation, apps, games and music downloaded from the
Google Play store with laborious slowness (about 8 to 20 minutes each).
Call quality depended on the environment.
From my third-floor apartment in San Francisco, I had no trouble hearing others
speak, but sometimes voices sounded slightly fuzzy.
The Rise runs on Sprint’s 3G network, which
doesn’t deliver especially good data speeds. I used the Rise for 6 hours before
the battery died; and in our formal lab tests, it held out for 7 hours, 49
minutes.
On the back of the Rise is a 3.2-megapixel
camera with flash; it’s mediocre at best (photos looked slightly fuzzy).
While the Kyocera Rise’s price and physical
keyboard are appealing, you definitely get what you pay for. I’d recommend the
Rise as a starter smartphone; experience users will want more from a
smartphone.
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Details
Ratings: 2.5/5
Price: $20 (with two-year contract, after
rebate)
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