At today’s 2013 summer new collection press conference, au announced the new “URBANO L01″ smartphone, to be released after late June.
Regarding the “URBANO”, au talked about its 2,700mAh battery which is able to be fully charged in only 140 minutes. Although the size of the body is about the same as the previous model, the size of the display increased from 4 inches to 4.7 inches.
It’s got some user-friendly functions, for example, you can set the “Entry home” display which displays letters and icons in a bigger size. The “Smart Sonic Receiver” function is useful as well – it makes the voice of the person who you are talking to on “URBANO L01″ clear in a noisy place.
Model: URBANO L01 Release date: After late June OS: Android 4.2 Size: 65 x 134 x 10.8mm Weight: 140g Display: 4.7 inch TFT LCD HD Battery: 2,700mAh Color: Green, White, Blue, Black Compliant with: Bluetooth, One-seg, Wi-Fi, Tethering, au Smart Pass, Wallet phone, 4G LTE, NFC, Infrared data communication, Waterproof, Dustproof
Popular young actress Ayame Goriki and current world-wide famous Japanese pop singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu joined the event, brightening up the venue…
The au 2013 summer new collection press conference took place at Shibuya Excel (Cerulean) Tokyu Hotel in Shibuya, Tokyo.
Are you looking for a possible budget smartphone? If you are, it looks like Kyocera might have a couple of phones headed for Verizon and US Cellular that could be right up your alley. Thanks to @evleaks, two Kyocera devices have been revealed. One of them is called the Kyocera Elite, while the other is known as the Kyocera XTRM. Unfortunately the specs for either device remain unknown at this point in time, but considering that Kyocera is not really known for their high-end offerings, at least as far as the US market is concerned, it is safe to assume that either device will play nice with your wallet.
However unlike the Kyocera Elite, the XTRM for US Cellular would suggest some sort of ruggedness which is given away in the edges of the phone which appear to be a bit more pronounced with some sort of bumpers attached to them. Either way with their renderings having been leaked, we expect that an official announcement should not be too far off, so check back with us at a later date for the details.
Kyocera does a good line in rugged (and often unconventional) smartphones, although this pair of leaked handsets, apparently headed to Verizon (left) and US Cellular (right), both appear to cut a more typical profile. As is often the way with serial leak artist @evleaks, there’s no full spec sheet to hand, although the US Cellular-bound XTRM appears to been given some bumper protection around the corners and will likely match that hardy name. Verizon will get the LTE-capable Elite, although we’ll have to wait for either the carriers — or Kyocera itself — to let us in on all the other details.
Earlier this year, we saw how the Kyocera Torque picked up approval from the folks over at the FCC, before being released to the market from Sprint. In fact, this particular smartphone was meant to be one tough cookie, so much so that it has been touted to survive just about anything (within reasonable means, of course), ranging from drops, shocks, drops, to water and extreme temperatures. Wirefly is offering the Kyocera Torque as well for $29.99 and a 2-year contract, and decided to put the handset through the paces as you can view in the video above.
It went through an entire washing machine wash cycle for a full 33 minutes, before it was placed into a bowl of water, followed by making a trip to the freezer for 15 hours. After taking approximately 2 hours or so to thaw out, it was dropped from a height of 15 feet, and the Kyocera Torque was still working fine and dandy. This 4” device has Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich in tow, accompanied by a dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960 S4 Plus processor, 1GB RAM, as well as front and back cameras. Is this the baddest phone you will ever get?
Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging for an update. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it’s easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make sure they don’t escape without notice, we’ve gathered every possible update, hack, and other miscellaneous tomfoolery we could find during the last week and crammed them into one convenient roundup. If you find something available for your device, please give us a shout at tips at engadget dawt com and let us know. Enjoy!
Sacrificing a smartphone’s thin and sleek form factor with a case is tantamount to sacrilege in some circles. Others feel little comfort venturing outdoors without having their phone wrapped safely in one sleeve or another. Sprint’s Kyocera Torque, though, is for people who demand more than just a sheath of silicone to keep their device safe. Instead of relying on a case for its protection, it’s durable in its own right, with an IP67 rating and Military Standard 810G certification to help it withstand everything from water to salt fog.
In addition, the handset carries the distinction of being the very first phone released in the US with Kyocera’s Smart Sonic Receiver tissue-conduction tech, which does away with the traditional earpiece. We put the Now Network’s first LTE push-to-talk phone through our review gauntlet not only to gauge how tough it is, but also to find out how well it performs. Head past the break to see how it fared.
Rugged smartphones meant for the trailblazer and the survivalist in all of us certainly aren’t rare, but it’s not very often that we get to review one. Kyocera recently announced the Torque, a mid-range smartphone that’s encased in a thick hard plastic shell that can absorb energy when dropped. It’s also water resistant and impervious to dust, and while the average hiker could easily take advantage of the device, the company also targets it towards construction workers and even parents who have small kids that can be more than a little rough with toys. Oh, and did we mention it’s Bear Grylls-approved?
Hardware & Design
The first thing you’ll notice with the Torque is its rugged look. It has a textured hard plastic Dura-Grip casing that protects it from drops, and every port is covered with a flap to keep water and dust out. The battery cover can come off, however, and it’s held on with a rather large screw that only requires a quarter turn to “unlock” it, so to speak. The cover is made out of a slightly-flexible rubber material to make it easy to pop off. Underneath the rear plate is a 2500mAh battery that powers the show, and it’s a slightly larger battery than we initially expected, but seeing how the Torque is meant for the adventurer, it’s critical to have a phone that can last all day.
The Torque comes with a 4-inch IPS display with a 800×480 resolution. Of course, that’s not really all that impressive, and those looking primarily for a top-quality display will want to look elsewhere, but otherwise it gets the job done, and most people who would need a rugged phone most likely won’t even care about the display’s quality in the first place. The screen is covered with a pre-installed screen protector as well, but it makes the screen look slightly blurry. We’re not sure what kind of screen protector is on the phone, but we could definitely tell that it made text and small icons a little blotchy.
As for the internals, the Torque comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz accompanied with 1GB of RAM. Sadly, it only has a measly 1GB of storage, but the phone has a microSD card slot that accepts up to 32GB of additional storage. The Torque sports a 5MP camera on the back, with a 1.3MP front-facing camera — more about that later.
As for ports and buttons, the Torque doesn’t rely on touch-based soft buttons. The phone consists of all physical buttons, including the three navigation buttons on the front. On the right side, there’s a dedicated camera button that acts as a shutter button, but it won’t open up the camera app itself. On the right side, there’s a volume rocker and a big yellow button for push-to-talk communication. On the top is the power button and a toggle button for turning the push-to-talk speaker on and off. Also on the top is the headphone jack in the middle. Then, on the bottom you have the microUSB port and the microphone.
The Torque also sports front-facing speakers, which is quite a rarity nowadays, and we were surprised to see that on a phone like this. The device houses the speakers at the bottom right below the navigation buttons, and I found it to be quite nice not having to cup my hand from the rear in order to get the sound to direct to the front, so having front-facing speakers is a small, but huge feature on this phone. As for the earpiece, it’s actually built into the glass display, and it relies on vibrations to deliver sound to your ear. It’s a weird concept, but Kyocera claims it makes voice calling quality better, especially in loud environments, like at a concert.
As for how rugged the Torque is, Kyocera claims it to be a pretty robust beast. The device meets Military Standard 810G, which applies to protection from dust, shock, vibration, temperature, rain, low pressure, solar radiation, and immersion in water for up to 30 minutes in up to 1 meter of water. I ended up dropping it a couple of times on my kitchen’s tile floor at different angles and it didn’t scratch it one bit, and it made more of a “thud” sound rather than a high-pitched cracking noise that you would get with most other smartphones. I even brought it in the shower with me and it was fine the whole time. However, Kyocera notes that the phone is inoperable while the screen is wet. We’re not sure if the phone disables itself somehow to avoid damage, but the phone stays on — you just can’t use it. In the end, you probably don’t need to worry too much about damaging the phone, which is something that most other smartphone owners can’t say about their precious toys.
Software
The Torque runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and the interface looks to be mostly stock, although there are a few pre-installed apps that may get in your way. Other than that, though, it looks like Kyocera mostly left the user interface alone, which is a huge plus for those wanting a true Android experience. However, those wanting the latest operating system will be disappointed for now, but Kyocera plans to upgrade the device to Jelly Bean within the next few months.
However, there are still a couple of Kyocera-exclusive features within the software, including a modified lock screen, that allows you to swipe the unlock circle in any direction to unlock the phone, and there’s also a camera icon that does the same thing. The icons at the bottom of the home screen are also just slightly changed up, with an ID app to the far right that allows you change the theme of the user interface.
Camera
The camera on the Torque isn’t the best, to put it simply. Even with adequate lighting, photos turned out to be really noisy, and white balance wasn’t working too well in most situations. Low-light capabilities weren’t too bad, though, but there was still a lot of noise in the photos, of course. I noticed that the camera would only focus the frame after I pressed the shutter button, meaning that as I was lining up my shot, the frame would remain blurry until I took the picture. At that point, the camera would quickly focus the frame and snap the photo. It only appeared to be doing that specifically with macro and other close-up shots, though.
Video quality was subpar as well. Automatic exposure and white balancing were average, but it would take a few seconds to refocus if I moved the camera around. As with the photos, ISO and noise were apparent, and while the camera is capable of shooting in HD, the quality isn’t too great, and it mostly looks like a standard-definition video that was blown up to HD standards, which as you know, doesn’t have good results. Overall, if you’re going hiking and are planning to do some sightseeing, you may want to bring a dedicated camera to take photos of that beautiful sunset over the canyon.
Performance & Battery Life
We ran the Torque through our go-to benchmarking apps, Quadrant and AnTuTu, and the results were a bit better than we expected. In AnTuTu, the Torque scored a 10,500, which is right on par with the Samsung Galaxy Note and the Galaxy S II, while just lagging behind a bit from the ASUS Transformer Prime. In Quadrant, the Torque scored just under a 4,200, which puts it on par with the Transformer Prime and almost up to snuff with the HTC One X, which is quite impressive.
As for battery life, knowing that the Torque had a 2500mAh battery, I was expecting to go longer than usual with this phone, and that’s exactly what happened. Streaming Netflix TV shows and movies non-stop on the Torque ended up lasting eight hours before the battery even reached 25%, and with normal use, it was easily lasting a couple of days without a problem. Of course, the large battery mixed with the low power requirements of the internal components makes the Torque one of the few smartphones on the market that can last a long time on a single charge.
Wrap-Up
In the end, while the Torque probably won’t win any awards in the looks department, it certainly gets props for being an extremely rugged smartphone. There’s definitely some things that could be better if it wants to compete with the flagship devices currently on the market, so you’ll definitely have to make some sacrifices in the performance department if you’re wanting something rugged. Although, we’d almost just rather get a better phone, slap on an OtterBox case, and call it a day.
Sprint has another smartphone available this time, and it is one tough cookie. So tough, in fact, that it has been advertised to be the handset that Bear Grylls would not mind using, as it was specially built to “survive extreme elements and everyday life.” Yes sir, while the might seem to be one tough cookie on the outside, underneath its belly is actually a soft creature, as this 4G LTE Android smartphone will retail for a mere $99.99 after a $50 mail-in-rebate, running on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich as the operating system of choice.
Specially constructed according to Military Standard 810G (MilSpec), the Kyocera Torque can withstand dust, shock, vibration, solar radiation, humidity, blowing rain, low pressure, salt fog and extreme temperatures, not to mention IP67 standards for dust, sprayed water and full immersion of up to one meter deep for up to 30 minutes. Grylls has been given the honor of bringing the Kyocera Torque on a bunch of “adventures” that would certainly push man – and phone, to the limit. I sure hope he does not end up trying to eat the Kyocera Torque in the wild when he’s low on food! [Press Release]
We first heard about — and went to town on — Kyocera’s latest smartphone toward the end of last month. Thankfully, the Torque happens to be an “ultra-rugged” device, meaning its creators didn’t mind at all when we tossed it against a wall or two. The LTE-packing Ice Cream Sandwich handset was made to the Military Standard 810G standard, so you can drop it, get it dirty or even submerge it in up to a meter of water for half an hour or so and go back for a little more Fruit Ninja — it’s also been placed in the hands of Mr. Man vs. Wild himself, Bear Grylls. The handset will be tumbling onto Sprint March 8th, with a $100 price (post two-year contract and $50 mail-in rebate).
Virgin Mobile has added a new prepaid Android smartphone to its lineup of devices. The new Android device is called the Kyocera Event and it is available for $79.99. The new smartphone has a 3.5-inch HVGA IPS touchscreen display that has wide viewing angles and adjustable brightness.
The smartphone supports 3G web connectivity and runs Android 4.0. The device has Swype text input that allows users to enter text using the on-screen keyboard without lifting a finger. The device also has a special Eco Mode that helps extend the battery life.
Under the hood, the smartphone has a 1 GHz QUALCOMM Snapdragon processor combined with 512 MB of RAM. Integrated storage is only 4 GB, but the Event has a microSD card slot that supports up to 32 GB of additional storage. The smartphone measures 4.5 x 2.4 x 0.46-inches and weighs 4.1 ounces.
Connectivity options for the device include integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The battery promises talk time of 8.7 hours and standby time of 6.25 days. The Kyocera Event will be available exclusively from RadioShack starting on March 3.
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Are you looking for a possible budget smartphone? If you are, it looks like Kyocera might have a couple of phones headed for Verizon and US Cellular that could be right up your alley. Thanks to 
Sprint has another smartphone available this time, and it is one tough cookie. So tough, in fact, that it has been advertised to be the handset that Bear Grylls would not mind using, as it was specially built to “survive extreme elements and everyday life.” Yes sir, while the might seem to be one tough cookie on the outside, underneath its belly is actually a soft creature, as this 4G LTE Android smartphone will retail for a mere $99.99 after a $50 mail-in-rebate, running on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich as the operating system of choice.
