Our last complaint with the Wild Card's design concerns its rear cover. To remove and access the battery, you have to turn a screw 45 degrees. Using a fingernail was difficult, so we usually used a small coin (no designated tool comes in the box). That's annoying and unnecessary.
Features
The Wild Card's 500-contact phone book has room in each entry for six separate phone numbers, as well as two e-mail addresses, two Web site addresses, two street addresses, and notes. There are two preset caller groups, and we were able to create our own, as well. Though you can set separate "personal" and "business" ringtones, the Wild Card only comes with nine polyphonic tones. What's more, photo and ringtone caller ID is available only for groups. And like with other Virgin Mobile phones, we don't understand why the vibrate feature works only at the highest volume level or in silent mode.
The M1000's organizer features include a voice memo; an event scheduler with day and month views; an alarm clock; a tip calculator; a timer; a stopwatch; and a calculator. Messaging features are plentiful; besides text and multimedia messaging, the Wild Card offers instant messaging and e-mail. Yet, it's too bad that then when starting a new text message you can't use the alphabetic keyboard to enter the name of one of your contacts. Instead, you must enter the number or pluck your contact from your phonebook.
Luckily, Bluetooth and voice dialing are also onboard, and you can use the speakerphone and voice-answering feature for hands-free calling. You can even set the camera to glow steadily like a flashlight. There's a programmable minute alert that beeps 10 seconds before each call minute passes, which is a good feature to help teens keep track of their minutes.
The Wild Card's 1.3-megapixel camera takes pictures in four resolutions (1,280x1,024, 640x480, 320x240, and 160x120) and three quality settings. Other editing features include three color tones, a multishot mode, a self-timer, a night mode, eight fun frames, brightness and white balance controls, and 10 shutter sounds. There's also a flash and a digital zoom, but the latter is unusable at the highest resolution. Photo quality was pretty good on the whole and slightly improved over Virgin's previous 1.3-meagpixel camera phone, the Kyocera Cyclops. Though colors were slightly faded, the resolution was sharp. For saving your work, the Wild Card offers 36MB of user-accessible memory.
You can personalize the Wild Card Alert with a variety of wallpaper, screensavers, a greeting banner, and a variety of alert and function sounds. You can download more options and more ringtones from Virgin Mobile via the WAP 2.0 wireless Web browser. The M1000 comes with two demo games--Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man--but you can download the full versions or buy additional titles. For music buffs, the Wild Card supports Virgin Mobile's Headliner service.
Performance
We tested the Wild Card in San Francisco. As an MVNO, Virgin mobile doesn't operate its own network; instead it leases space on Sprint's network. Call quality was mostly fair, but we noticed a few issues worth reporting. Though voices sounded natural and we enjoyed enough volume, the audio was just a bit patchy. It didn't disrupt our conversations, but it was still noticeable. The Wild Card does have Virgin's Mobile's "smart volume" feature, which is supposed to adjust the volume based on your surroundings. We couldn't really tell if it worked or not. Also, we noticed that the ringer volume was somewhat low.
On their end, callers said they could hear us, though they could tell we were using a cell phone. They didn't report the same problems that we encountered, but they said the phone picked up a lot of background noise. Speakerphone calls weren't great. The sound was bass-heavy, and we had to be near the phone if we wanted our friends to hear us. As we mentioned earlier, the speaker is next to the internal display, so you should use the speakerphone when the phone is open.
The Kyocera Wild Card M1000 has a rated battery life of 3.25 hours and a digital SAR rating of 6.25 days. Our tests revealed a talk time of 3 hours, 45 minutes. According to FCC radiation charts, the Wild Card has a digital SAR rating of 1.46 watts per kilogram.
What You'll Pay
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