Kyocera K10 Royale review

Downloading ring tones, games, and wallpaper from the Virgin XL Web store was surprisingly fast and painless, except for navigating menus that display only three lines of text at any given time. The Royale is packed with two demo games, Bejeweled and Jamdat Bowling, but the tiny buttons made play frustrating and would probably dissuade you from buying the full versions.

There are seven preloaded polyphonic ring tones, and you can download real superphonic music clips from the Virgin XL store. Any ring tone can be matched with the violent vibrate alert, but curiously, the phone vibrates for a good 5 to 7 seconds before the ringer actually sounds. There is no single key or key-combo shortcut to put the phone into silent vibrate mode until a call actually comes in.

We tested the dual-band Kyocera K10 Royale (CDMA 800/1900; AMPS 800), which uses Sprint's PCS 1xRTT network, while wandering about Manhattan. As noted, voice quality was excellent, with plenty of volume. As with most candy bar-style handsets, the Royale's mic doesn't extend down as close to the mouth as a clamshell phone's, which means more ambient noise is likely to leak into your conversation. But fellow conversationalists reported only minor outdoor hollowness, even with traffic whirring noisily by. At our end, there was only a hint of Sprint's familiar echo. Vocal quality was solid and near landline level.

Ringer volume is about medium and difficult to hear from a backpack or briefcase in any moderately noisy environment. The vibrating alert was far more effective at alerting us to an incoming call when the phone was in a pants pocket.

The Royale is rated at a relatively short 3.5 hours of talk time and 7.5 days of standby, but a major segment of the battery meter disappeared after less than 10 minutes of conversation and about an hour of futzing with settings and downloads. In our tests, however, we got 3.25 hours of talk time on a single charge and 5.5 days of standby time. According to FCC radiation tests, the K10 Royale has a digital SAR rating of 1.12 watts per kilogram.