Kyocera Tempo E2000 review

Features
The Kyocera Tempo comes with a 500-entry address book, with room in each entry for six phone numbers, two e-mail addresses, two URLs, two street addresses, and notes. You can organize callers into groups, pair them with a picture for caller ID, plus one of 13 polyphonic ringtones. Other features include text and multimedia messaging, a speakerphone, a vibrate mode, a scheduler, a calendar, a calculator, a tip calculator, an alarm clock, a world clock, a memo pad, a voice memo recorder, and a timer. More advanced users will like the stereo Bluetooth, the 1x EV-DO speed, and the wireless Web browser.

The Kyocera Tempo has a 1.3-megapixel camera.

Since the phone's name is Tempo, it follows that its star feature is its music player. Indeed, we like the player's simple controls, especially with the external music player keys on the front of the device. You can create and modify playlists, plus set it on repeat or shuffle mode. You can also choose to repeat an individual track. The Tempo supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, and WMA file formats, and you can load the songs to the phone via a microSD card (in fact, a microSD card is required to load the music). Unfortunately, the Tempo does not come with a microSD card or a USB charging cable, and it's only capable of supporting up to 2GB cards at a time. This is quite unfortunate as it burdens the consumer with buying extra items just to load music on to the phone.

The Tempo also comes with a 1.3-megapixel camera that can take photos in four resolutions (1,280x1,024, 640x480, 320x240, and 160x120), three quality settings, four color tones, and four white balance settings. Other camera options include a low light mode, a self-timer, multishot, a time stamp option, five shutter sounds (with a silent option), brightness setting, and flash. You can also choose to turn on the LED light. There's also a video recorder, and its settings include brightness, white balance, quality (which sets the video compression), LED light on or off, and recording light on or off. Photo quality was decent, with good color saturation, though pictures did appear blurry and a little overcast in low light situations. As you might expect, video was choppy and pixelated.

You can personalize the Kyocera Tempo with several different graphics and sounds, and if you want more you can buy them from U.S. Cellular's easyedge store. The Tempo doesn't come with any games.

Performance
We tested the Kyocera Tempo with U.S. Cellular's roaming network in San Francisco. Call quality was good--callers said we sounded loud and clear, and we had no problems hearing them, either. Voices sounded a little robotic at times, and there was the occasional static in the background, but it wasn't too bad. Speakerphone quality was quite good as well with plenty of volume. Incoming sound had a rather tinny and hollow quality, but that's typical for most speakerphones.

Music quality was good, too. There wasn't a lot of bass, but audio sounded clear and crisp. We would recommend using a headset over the speaker for the best quality.

The Kyocera Tempo has a rated battery life of 3.5 hours talk time and 8.8 days standby time. It has a tested talk time of 3 hours 23 minutes. According to FCC radiation tests, the Tempo has a digital SAR rating of 1.13 watts per kilogram.