Kyocera DuraXT (Sprint)

The Kyocera DuraXT ($69.99) is Sprint's replacement for the Kyocera DuraMax (3 stars). It has a bigger, better speaker, but is otherwise pretty much the same rugged flip-style?cell phone. It's super tough, uses Sprint's relatively new Direct Connect service, and has a loud speaker and great battery life. A dated UI and few features mean it's only average otherwise, but if you need a push-to-talk feature phone, the DuraXT is your best bet.

Design, Call Quality, and Direct Connect
Like Sprint's other push-to-talk phones, the DuraXT is built like a big old brick. It measures 4 by 2.1 by 1.1 inches (HWD) when closed, and is covered in a grippy, scratch-resistant, rubberized casing. It's also a bit heavy, at 5.3 ounces. It feels tough, and that's for good reason. The DuraXT meets military specification 810G, so it's resistant to dust, extreme temperatures, low pressure, rain, salt fog, shock, and vibration, among other rough conditions. It can even be submerged in three feet of standing water for 30 minutes. It survived plenty of drops of drops to the floor of the PCMag Labs with nary a scratch. On one drop the door that covers the charging port came open, but nothing was damaged. We also placed the phone in a bucket of water, where it was still able to receive calls and snap photos.

There's a 1-inch, monochrome 96-by-64-pixel external display that shows battery life, reception, and time. The internal 320-by-240-pixel LCD looks surprisingly sharp. The default font size is a bit small, but you can make it larger. The phone's keypad is great; it features large, raised keys with plenty of space in between, which should make it possible to dial while wearing gloves.

The DuraXT is a dual-band EV-DO Rev. A (850/1900 MHz) device with no Wi-Fi.?Reception is average and voice quality is good overall. Earpiece volume goes very loud, and voices sound clear, if a bit thin. Calls made with the phone also sound natural, with good noise cancellation. Calls sounded good through a?Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars) and the Nuance-powered voice dialing worked well. Battery life was great at 8 hours and 12 minutes of talk time.

Back when we reviewed the DuraMax, our biggest issue was that the speaker volume wasn't as loud as we would've liked it to be. After all, a push-to-talk phone should be built to hear outside in a noisy environment. While the DuraXT's speaker isn't quite deafening, it is certainly louder than the DuraMax. It's loud enough to hear on a busy city street, so it should be loud enough to hear over most reasonable construction noise.

Sprint's Direct Connect service combines the 3G Internet speeds and nationwide coverage of Sprint's CDMA network with the instantaneous push-to-talk of the old Nextel iDEN network. You need to be in a Sprint coverage area in order to use the DuraXT, but you can still make push-to-talk calls to Nextel iDEN subscribers.?The new network supports Call Alert With Text, which sends an audio alert and text message to another subscriber, along with Group Connect, which can connect 20 subscribers together at once. You can also use the Direct Connect button to mass-message up to 200 Direct Connect subscribers in one shot, or to send recorded messages to email addresses or handsets via text message.?

For this review, I tested Direct Connect using two different DuraXTs. It takes about a second to initiate the connection, after which transmissions are essentially instantaneous. Voice quality is solid, and like the speakerphone, volume is suitably loud.

Apps, Multimedia, and Conclusions
Like the rest of Sprint's push-to-talk lineup, the DuraXT is an otherwise bare bones feature phone. The main menu features the same grid with 12 icons that Sprint has used on many flip phones in the past. It's dated, and requires many button presses to perform even the simplest tasks.

There's an Access NetFront 4.1 browser for reading WAP pages; desktop HTML is out. The DuraXT also supports Sprint Navigation for voice-enabled, turn-by-turn directions, as well as Sprint Family Locator. You also get the standard apps like an alarm, calculator, and calendar.

There's no music or video player, so the nonstandard 2.5mm headphone jack on the right side of the phone isn't a big issue. You get 64MB of free internal memory, along with a 2GB microSD card installed in the slot underneath the battery. You probably won't need anything larger than this, though my 32 and 64GB SanDisk cards worked fine as well.

The 3.2-megapixel camera includes an LED flash, but no auto-focus. It snaps photos in about 0.5 second, but then takes a good 2 seconds to save them. Test photos look decent, if a little dark, with acceptable color and detail. Videos, on the other hand, are terrible. They max out at a miniscule 176-by-144-pixels and play back at a stuttering 10 frames per second indoors and 15 frames per second outside.

If you're looking for a push-to-talk feature phone on Sprint, the Kyocera DuraXT is your best bet. The Kyocera DuraCore ($49.99, 3 stars) costs $20 less, but it isn't as rugged and lacks a camera. The Kyocera DuraPlus?($69.99, 3 stars) is a slab-style phone that's just as rugged as the DuraXT, but it's a 6.7-ounce beast that also lacks a camera. If you're interested in something more advanced, the?Motorola Admiral?($99.99, 4 stars) is a ruggedized push-to-talk Android smartphone with plenty of excellent multimedia features, as well as access to more than 400,000 apps in the Android Market.?

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