Kyocera Rise Review

Introduction:

Kyocera is not usually the first name you think of when smartphones come to mind, but they have an admirable track record of keeping costs low while offering solid if not top-tier products. Formerly Sanyo, Kyocera has had their share of innovative designs and they have held their own in the entry-level market. The Rise embraces this philosophy, bringing Android 4.0 and a sliding QWERTY keyboard at a low price. Packaged with the Rise you’ll find a microUSB cable, AC adapter and a 2GB microSD card.

Design:

Unlike the peanut-shaped Milano, Kyocera has taken a more traditional approach to the Rise. The top and bottom are curved and finished with soft touch plastic, making the device very comfortable and reassuring to hold in landscape mode. It’s a good design choice, as you’ll likely be sliding out the keyboard while doing most anything on the Rise. Around back the silver battery door houses the 3.2 megapixel camera and LED flash. The back is curved to naturally fit the contours of your hand, making the Rise quite comfortable to hold.



You can compare the Kyocera Rise with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The keyboard is almost very good, with adequate key spacing and feedback. The space bar is a bit too small and stiff for our liking, though we will admit that it feels like it will break in with continued use. They keyboard slides open and closed with a very reassuring and heavy spring assist, but it does wobble a bit while closed. It is not as good as we saw on the Milano, but at the same time we’re not worried about long-term stability.

Display:

Otherwise the design is fairly non-descript, with a 3.5” HVGA IPS display sitting above four capacitive keys (the Rise adds a menu button to the three tradition Android 4.0 keys.) The display is again a weak spot on the phone, even though the resolution has been bumped from the Milano. At just 165ppi images are grainy and text is far from sharp, and while viewing angles are good the display washes out in bright light.

Interface and Software:

The Kyocera Rise is a SprintID device, but running otherwise stock Android 4.0. We’ve seen a trend towards more vanilla devices from Sprint, and we applaud it. On previous SprintID offering the ID app was hardcoded into the launcher, but with Android 4.0 offering a customizable launcher the user can remove and replace it just like any other app. With the exception of the lock screen, which offers a slide to unlock and a separate slide to access the camera, the user experience is exactly the same as you’d find on the Galaxy Nexus.



The app experience is strikingly similar to a Nexus as well, with only a handful of pre-installed apps like Sprint Zone and ID. All the main features of the phone, like music, camera, contacts and calendar rely on the stock Android apps. Like the Milano, there is an Eco Mode app that is basically a quick settings app that lets you set options like backlight, brightness, haptic feedback and wallpaper to “green” settings. It isn’t anything special, but being reminded of your power consumption is never a bad thing.



Processor:

A 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S2 MSM8655 powers the Rise, with 512MB of RAM and 2GB of internal storage available. It has respectable benchmark numbers, but overall performance is as you’d expect from a single-core device with only half a gig of RAM.

	Quadrant Standard	AnTuTu	NenaMark 2
Kyocera Rise	2084	3147	41,8
LG Optimus Elite	2126	2915	35
LG Optimus L5	1470	2665	14,2
Samsung Galaxy mini 2	1922	2695	15,5

Connectivity and Internet:

The Rise is Sprint’s first Android 4.0 device without NFC, and as a 3G device it lacks LTE, but it has all the other connection options you’d expect. Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and GPS are all on board. Web browsing was a low point, as it took the Rise a very long time to fully load web pages on both the stock browser and Chrome. Chrome definitely performed quicker than the stock browser while moving around pages though.

Camera:

Kyocera has stuck with a 3-megapixel camera on the Rise, and as you would expect results aren’t stellar. Strong light gives the best results with acceptable color reproduction, but even still details are grainy. The darker it gets, the worse the camera performs and the added LED flash really doesn’t add anything. Videos can be shot at a max of WVGA, and like the camera results aren’t great. The Rise is certainly not going to replace your point and shoot, but it’s not great for spur of the moment shots either.





Multimedia:

Sticking true to the mostly vanilla Android mantra, the Rise does not feature any multimedia apps outside of the core Google offerings. Play Music handles your mp3 collection, and the gallery takes care of any local videos you’d like to watch. Many more options are available in the Play Store, of course.

Call Quality:

The Rise takes a step back from the Milano’s solid call quality. Callers complained that we were hollow, as if we were standing in a cave with wax paper over the mic. They were able to understand us, but stated that they had to concentrate to do so, and overall rated us 7.5/10. They sounded a bit better than that to us, with plenty of volume and a natural voice quality.

Battery:

The battery remains virtually unchanged in capacity (1490mAh to 1500), but you’ll get an extra hour of talk time out of the Rise compared to the Milano, according to Kyocera.


Conclusion:

The Rise offers some nice features, such as a decent slide out QWERTY and a mostly vanilla Ice Cream Sandwich build, but in the end it has too many shortcomings. Despite being bigger and higher resolution than the Milano, the Rise’s screen is still of poor quality and the call quality has taken a hit too. The camera was predictably bad, but for $20 on contract you’d expect that. The Rise gets bonus points for offering Android 4.0 at a low price, but we liked the Milano and LG’s Optimus Elite better.

Software 1.003SP
Android 4.0.4

Kyocera Rise Video Review: