Virgin Mobile Kyocera M1000 Wild Card Cell Phone - Features and Performance
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This cell phone has a decent number of features, especially for someone who is just breaking into the smart phone market. This device will save up to 500 contacts with room for up to six phone numbers, email addresses, street addresses, and more. Plus, it features some relatively good organization options, such as a calendar, calculator (with tip calculator), alarm clock, timer, voice memos, and others.
The call features are pretty basic with the exception of voice dialing and Bluetooth capabilities. The Bluetooth feature allows you to pair the Wild Card with a Bluetooth headset for hands-free use. There is also a speaker phone on-board with a built-in sensor that automatically adjusts the volume of the call based upon the noisiness of your surroundings. Despite this cool technology, the call quality is nothing special - it performs on a par with most other cell phones. Speaker phone call quality wasn't all that great either. CNet performed some field tests with the Wild Card to test the speaker phone quality, and found that "speaker phone 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."
Probably the best feature of the Wild Card is its email and instant messaging capabilities. The instant messaging feature is limited to AIM and Yahoo, but these are two of the most popular IM clients, so I don't think that it's necessarily a bad thing. The Wild Card supports most of the popular email clients including Yahoo, AOL, AIM, Comcast, Earthlink, Juno, NetZero, and Verizon.net. It's a little disappointing that Gmail and MSN's Hotmail are not supported, but nonetheless, the IM and email features work great thanks to the nicely designed keyboard that makes typing a good experience.
The 1.3 MP digital camera is a nice upgrade over the Switchback's worthless 300k pixel camera. The Wild Card's camera features a flash that doubles as a mini flashlight. The camera offers four different resolution settings and three quality settings. The Wild Card only has 36 MB of internal memory for saving photos, so you won't be able to get a ton of photos in this phone. You can assign any photo to be a screen saver or wallpaper on this phone, and you can also purchase wallpapers from Virgin Mobile right from the cell phone itself.
This phone comes equipped with a couple of trial games (Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man), and more games can be purchased (along with music, ringtones, and wallpapers) via the VirginXL web service. This service does carry some additional fees. The Wild Card comes equipped with a WAP web browser for browsing compatible websites. I haven't heard very much about this feature, but I'm assuming that it would work well for checking the weather, stock quotes, and possibly for checking the latest news stories - other than that, it's probably not worth it for most people.
Battery performance is rated for 3.25 hours of talk time and 150 hours of standby. CNet's tests confirmed the manufacturer's figures, and they came up with 3 hours 45 minutes of talk time. These numbers are not very good; I would strongly recommend purchasing the travel charger ($20) so that you can charge this phone while you're on the road.
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