Kyocera DuraPlus (Sprint)

The Kyocera DuraPlus ($69.99) should come with a heavy machinery warning: If you drop it, it may cause damage to the machinery. The DuraPlus is a gigantic brick of a push-to-talk cell phone, and one of the first to hook into Sprint's next-generation?Direct Connect?service. It's a lot like Kyocera's recent DuraMax?($69.99, 3.5 stars) and DuraCore?($49.99, 3 stars), but trades their flip-style form factor for a slab design that may be easier to use out in the field. The DuraPlus ?is good for voice-only, push-to-talk communication, but it's a massive phone with few other features.

Design and Call Quality
Colleagues passing my desk kept stopping to comment on the huge size of the DuraPlus. At 5.3 by 2.2 by .9 inches (HWD) and a whopping 6.7 ounces, the DuraPlus is?definitely not going to fit in your pocket, but it'll fit on your tool belt.?Though the virtually indestructible Sonim XP3300 Force?($525, 3.5 stars) is another huge handset, it wears its size more gracefully than the DuraPlus does. The DuraPlus's exterior is made mostly of grippy, scratch-resistant black rubber, with metallic accents on the front.

The DuraPlus is a rugged phone that meets military specification 810G, which makes it resistant to dust, extreme temperatures, low pressure, rain, salt fog, shock, and vibration. It can also be submerged in up to 3 feet of water for 30 minutes. The phone survived numerous drops to the floor of the PCMag Labs, along with half an hour's worth of submersion in a container of water. A plastic screw secures the battery cover tightly, but you can easily unlock it with your fingernail.

The phone's 2-inch, 320-by-240-pixel LCD looks sharp. The font is a little small by default, but you can make it larger. The keypad has too many function keys, but at least all of the keys are large, raised, and well-spaced, which should make it possible to dial while wearing gloves. One of those function keys activates the surprisingly powerful LED flashlight on top of the phone, which may come in handy depending on your work environment.

The DuraPlus 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. Voices sound rich and clear in the earpiece, but while the volume goes loud, it isn't loud enough to be heard in a noisy work environment. The speakerphone, however, is very clear and goes super loud, which is something we felt was lacking on the DuraCore and DuraMax. Calls also sounded good through a Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars) and the Nuance-powered voice dialing worked well. Battery life was excellent at 9 hours and 27 minutes of talk time.

Direct Connect
Sprint's new CDMA push-to-talk system combines the fast Internet speeds and nationwide coverage of Sprint's CDMA network with the instantaneous push-to-talk of the old Nextel iDEN network. That's great, but it doesn't really matter for a device like the DuraPlus, which isn't built for heavy Web access.

You need to be in a Sprint coverage area in order to use the DuraPlus, but you can still make push-to-talk calls to Nextel iDEN subscribers.?Direct Connect 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 between two different DuraPlus phones. It takes about a second or to initiate the connection, after which transmissions are nearly instantaneous. Voice quality is clear and you should no trouble hearing someone, even in a noisy environment.

Apps, Multimedia, and Conclusions
Rugged form factor and Direct Connect aside, the DuraPlus is an almost featureless feature phone. The main menu is the same 12 icon grid that Sprint has used on many flip phones in the past (including the DuraCore and the DuraMax), which gives the phone a dated look and feel. To make things worse, this interface requires at least nine button presses to perform simple tasks like pairing a Bluetooth headset. There's an Access NetFront 4.1 browser for reading WAP pages, but the screen is too small and browsing is slow. There's support for TeleNav GPS Navigator, which gets you voice-enabled, turn-by-turn directions, as well as Sprint Family Locator.

There's a nonstandard 2.5mm headphone jack on the right side of the phone for voice headsets. The phone has a meager 64MB of free internal memory and no microSD card slot, but without a music or video player, this shouldn't be an issue.

If you need a loud, rugged, brick of a phone to shout commands through, the Kyocera DuraPlus is a decent choice. For the same price, the Kyocera DuraMax is a slightly smaller rugged flip phone, and adds a decent camera and a microSD card slot to the mix. The Kyocera DuraCore costs $20 less, and is essentially the same phone as the DuraMax, minus the camera. If those phones aren't loud enough for you, and you don't mind sticking with Sprint's steadily declining iDEN network, the?Motorola Brute i686?($139.99, 3.5 stars) gets you very loud push-to-talk, albeit for a higher price. And if you're really looking to take advantage of Direct Connect, the Motorola Admiral?($99.99, 4 stars) is a rugged Android smartphone with excellent multimedia features, as well as access to more than 450,000 apps in the Google Play store.

Benchmarks
Continuous talk time:?9 hours 27 minutes

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