Kyocera Slider Sonic KX5B review (Virgin Mobile)

The Kyocera Slider Sonic also comes with a reasonably full-featured video recorder, which shoots up to 30-second clips of video in 3GP videoconferencing format. You can adjust the white balance and brightness or turn on the LED flash for some limited lighting; and unlike photos snapped with the camera, the Sonic's videos are saved to the TransFlash card automatically, so you can transfer them to your system without running up your monthly bill. For a camera phone, the Slider Sonic has fair photo quality. Our pictures looked a little grainy and washed out, but that's to be expected with a VGA-resolution camera. Meanwhile, the movies we shot with the video recorder looked blocky and murky, but again, even the best camera phones falter when it comes to video recording.

The Kyocera Slider Sonic's notable MP3/WMA player boasts a slick interface, complete with track, artist, and album names, time elapsed/total time info, a progress bar, and a small diagram of the player's controls, which include play/pause, skip/back, song list, and stop. You can create playlists on the fly, shuffle and repeat your tunes, and jump ahead 5 seconds within a song. Even better, you can transfer tunes from your PC to the phone via USB or with the TransFlash card--an unexpected bonus. However, we wish the player had an equalizer so that we could tweak the sound, especially since the included earbuds are so tinny.

Personalization options on the Kyocera Slider Sonic are a mixed bag; you can use snapshots as wallpaper or screensavers, choose one of nine color schemes, tweak the greeting banner, or change the menu style; choices include the standard list, plus the animated icon and wheel options. But while you can assign pictures to your contacts, you can't give them individual ring tones or even set a ring tone for a customized caller group--a sore disappointment for a multimedia phone such as this one. The phone comes with a trio of Java (J2ME) unlocked games, including Jamdat Bowling 2, Tony Hawk's Underground, and the puzzle game Bejeweled; you can also download more games and apps to the Java-enabled handset from VirginXL.

We tested the Kyocera Slider Sonic (CDMA 800/1900, AMPS 800) in New York City; our callers sounded loud and clear, and they couldn't tell we were on a cell phone. We also tried the Sonic in our interference-heavy living room--complete with a 32-inch TV, a Wi-Fi network, a microwave oven, and a wireless phone--and didn't run into any trouble. Speakerphone quality was diminished, but calls were still relatively clear.

Kyocera promises nearly 4 hours of talk time and about 6.5 days of standby time from the Slider Sonic; in our tests, however, we got about 2.5 hours of talk time--a bit skimpy in our book. For standby time, we came away with 7 days on a single charge.