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The Kickflip's feature set is also very similar to that of the Hero. You get a 2-megapixel camera with flash, the wireless browser, a music player, a voice recorder, a speakerphone, vibrate mode, EV-DO support, and a video player and recorder. The address book can hold as many as 1,200 contacts (compared to the Hero's 500), each of which can accommodate five numbers, two e-mail addresses, a birthday, an anniversary date, a memo, and photo caller ID. You can also organize your contacts into groups and assign them with one of 21 polyphonic ring tones. There are the usual text- and multimedia-messaging features, but sadly, the phone doesn't support instant messaging--a huge oversight for a phone designed for the younger crowd. Rounding out the features are e-mail, a calendar, an alarm, a calculator, world time, and a notepad. Like the Hero, the Kickflip doesn't have Bluetooth, which we found similarly disappointing.
If you wish to learn more about the MySpace Mobile integration, the Helio on Top news aggregator, and the music and video player, please read our review of the Helio Hero for details on these features.
The Kickflip's 2-megapixel camera comes with a slew of settings. There are six available resolutions (1,600x1,200, 1,280x960, 800x600, 640x480, 320x240, and 240x320), four quality settings (Normal, Small, Superfine, Fine), up to 5X zoom, and a series or multishot setting for up to nine consecutive snaps. You can spruce up your shots with 10 different photo "stickers," 10 brightness settings, six light settings, six capture modes, 14 photo effects, and the ability to rotate the photos. You can also choose between two shutter sounds, though you can't disable it. The camera produced decent snapshots, but we couldn't say the same about the disappointingly low 176x144 resolution on the video recorder.
Like the Hero, the Kickflip has a long list of personalization options. You can change the wallpaper, the screensaver, the ring tones, the graphics, the menu styles, and so forth. You also have the choice of downloading additional ring tones and games from the Helio store. There are two games included with the phone--Hello CAT and a demo of MidnightPool3D--and you can always download more.
We tested the dual-band (CDMA 800/1900; EV-DO) Kickflip in San Francisco using Helio's service. We found the call quality to be subpar, especially in our office building, where there was a lot of electronic equipment that caused quite a bit of interference. Callers could hardly hear us at times, and though we could hear them, there was a lot of static during calls. When making calls from a more isolated location, the quality was a little better, but callers still had problems hearing us. The Kickflip's speakerphone quality was similarly dismal, and music playback sounded tinny. The Kickflip comes with a wired headset that doubles as a set of earbuds for the phone's music player functions. Downloading files was fast enough, though we experienced the occasional lag.
The Helio Kickflip has a rated talk time of around 3 hours and a rated standby time of up to eight days; our tests showed a talk time of 3 hours, 10 minutes and a standby time of eight days. According to FCC radiation tests, the Helio Kickflip has a digital SAR rating of 0.86 watt per kilogram.
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