Airtime, Pocket and K132...and My 16th Birthday is Tomorrow!

First off, because I've been signed on with some huge distributors, I'm not selling Tracfone airtime here anymore, at least for the forseeable future. However, all I did was go to Tracfone's website and bought their free-phone-with-airtime-card deals, so someone else can pick up there and I'll be glad to link to them.

Second, I just got Pocket (www.pocket.com) unlimited cellular service last night. Sort of a birthday present. But anyway they seem okay, other than the fact that SMS shortcodes don't work, and the fact that the Kyocera K132 is a lousy phone.

Which brings me to a quick mini-review of the Kyocera K132 Shadow, somewhat akin to the Kyocera KX9d (Oystr) except with better styling and a worse UI...

Firswt off, the phone looks nice. That's about its only claim to fame, but its angular, relatively thin design and dark blue soft-touch finish is clessy. The annoying thing though is there isn't even a status light on the outside, just the speakerphone grille, which incidentally is passable in quality and loudness.

When you open up the phone, it's not quite as pretty, but it still looks okay. Until you turn it on. At which point the smallish screen is white for a few second, then slowly boots up to a home screen that reminds me of something out of 2004 or maybe a little earlier. In other words, Kyocera's UI on this phone defines "backward".

Yet so does the UI's speed, which is odd considering that there aren't many shiny graphics to push around. On top of this, the phone has two types of ringtones: ones you can use and ones you can't for no apparent reason. Wierd.

What about call quality? Well, it's okay enough if you're in an area that has very good signal. But when you *should* have okay signal, it's a toss-up whether the phone will break up or not. Yay internal antennas...I really think the phone can be blamed for bad reception at my house rather than the network.

As to battery life, I don't really know, as I've only had the phone for about 18 hours. It seems to hold a charge fairly well, but I can't really tell as I haven't had enough time to tell whether it'll work for long periods of time or not.

But I'm not going to keep it. It's just not the kind of phone that I want to use to do all of my talking on, which it's supposed to be since it's on an unlimited plan. Heck, uts angularness makes it slightly uncomfortable to hold. Ah well...

Turning to something else, my birthday is tomorrow! My sixteenth birthday, that is. I hope I have a good one! I should have the review of the Nokia 061 up either today or tomorrow...see everyone then!