We had a chance to play with the Kyocera Zio and I wasn’t expecting much from it, but I walked away pretty impressed.
The handset feels pretty good in the hand: it’s light, sleek and has just enough screen real estate to make the whole thing work. It’s not the most feature-packed Android phone (it has a nice processor though) but it’s going to be hitting Cricket as a low cost Android phone. This is actually fulfilling the promise of Android: manufacturers are taking the operating system down market and bringing smartphones to the masses.
The Kyocera Zio spec-sheet makes for a fairly impressive read. The Zio features a 3.5-inch WVGA touchscreen, 3G data connectivity, 3.2-megapixel camera, 600 MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 processor, Bluetooth, WiFi, 512 MB of on-board memory for apps, microSD memory card slot, trackball, and is powered by Android 1.6 OS (which can be upgraded to Android 2.1). Overall, the handset gives you all the bang you could ask for your buck – especially when that buck has to stick to a budget.
Check out the video below and look for it in the second quarter on Cricket, with other CDMA carriers to come.
