Kyocera's Neo E1100 shows some style
During the last two CTIA shows, Kyocera has demonstrated a talent for unveiling new cell phone with a bit of design pizzazz. Last year it was the Kyocera E5000, and this year it is the Neo E1100. Sporting an extremely minimalist design in basic black, the E1100 is a thin (0.66 inche) flip phone with a glowing blue "lightpipe" down the center of its front face. Though you may think there's no external display, there is a hidden screen that runs vertically to the left of the lightpipe. Typically we're not big fans of hidden displays, and the E1100's seems awfully small, but in this case it seems to work well with the handset's sleek design. Another unique feature is the reverse hinge, which causes the Neo's front flap to fold behind its rear face when the phone is open. We first saw a reverse hinge in the Sony Ericsson Z600. Though on that handset we complained that the hinge rubbed against our face, we've gotten used to the feature as it has shown up on more phones. Inside the Neo there's a 262,000 color display a set of flush controls navigations keys.
Kyocera Neo E1100
(Credit: Kyocera)On the whole the Neo's feature set is respectable. You'll find voice recognition, text and multimedia messaging, Bluetooth 2.0, a speakerphone, BREW for game and application downloads, MP3 ringtones, a 1.3-megapixel camera, and personal organizer features. A micro USB port will let you connect the Neo to a PC, but we had mixed feeling about the 2.5mm headset jack. Though it's better than some obscure proprietary jack, a 3.5mm jack would be ideal. Also, it delivers only mono sound.
Availability and pricing for the CDMA phone is still to come but we sincerely hope that will actually come to market. Kyocera has its share of models that never seem to make it off the trade show floor, the E5000 is just on example, so we hope that the Neo will have better luck.
Kent German is a senior editor for cell phone reviews at CNET. When he's not testing the newest handsets on the market, he's blogging about cell phone news for Crave. In his On Call column, he answers reader questions and gives his take on the rapidly changing mobile industry. E-mail Kent.
DISPLAY - The display is crisp and bright, the controls are tight and responsive, the sound quality is good. The hidden display is just the right size.
SOUND - Speaker phone volume means I have to crank up the volume to hear it but it's acceptable. Callers said I was loud and clear, which was nice to hear since my first Neo handset microphone was defective.
CONTACTS - I like how it prioritizes multiple phone numbers for the same contact, so you can still have several ways to get a hold of someone and assign them a "home, work, mobile" tag, but the Primary number is listed first which is nice.
TEXTING - It doesn't use T9 predictive text that allows you to select a word from a dropdown list. Instead it uses Rapid Entry which performs an on-the fly word prediction, but doesn't allow you to select from words that are one letter off. It correctly spells "whisper" from "whipped" but can't distinguish between "up" and "us", so when you are in a text message, you have to misspell a word to trigger the "add it to the dictionary" mode; there doesn't appear to be a straight foward way of editing the dictionary. Also, when you add a word to Quick Text, you can delete it through Message Settings/Edit Quick Text but you have to backspace it out instead of just deleting it. The Add Symbols menu has 4 pages of symbols and punctuation but isn't grouped by expected frequency of use; the new paragraph "¶" is on page 1 and greater or less than"<,>" are on page 3, while the comma "," and dollar sign "$" are on page 3. You can "blind CC" and request receipt of messages.
MESSAGING - I like how the Neo shows that a multimedia message is incoming and what the progress level is.
SETTINGS - There are a variety of stock wallpapers, themes, ring tones, notifications, volume settings and reminders that you can enable or disable. I like how you can disable altogether the startup and shutdown sounds.
TOOLS & GAMES - The alarm clock can be customized by each day. The scheduler is intuitive and functional. My phone only came with one game Brick Attack, but I don't play games on my phone so it was good that a lot of games aren't pre-installed.
CAMERA - The camera is good quality, as good as the Samsung Blackjack1 camera I had, with several quality settings. There is no flash. The pics can be exported by Pic Message or USB cable.
DESIGN - The phone is comfortable to use, the clamshell hinge is sturdy and the buttons are durable. There are dedicated buttons for Speaker and Back. Kyrocera built in a separate Info helper for each function, which is nice. Some contextual "yes,no, save, delete" key assignments are not consistent; the same key that is used to delete or decline something for one mode is assigned a save or accept
function for another mode.
BOTTOM LINE: A great functional phone. Extra keystrokes will be necessary if you like to text a lot. Out of 5 stars (with 5 being the best and 1 star being the worst), I rate it a 4.
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by flwbud
November 24, 2009 3:24 PM PST
- I have had this phone since the end of july. At first it work great but now it sucks.Now it restarts its self without me touching it,the lightpipe just started to go off by its self and half the time when people call me the phone never rings!! this is by far the worst cell phone i have ever had!!!!
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