Brief Bottom End Phone Review

lxskllr

No Lifer
Nov 30, 2004
59,667
10,179
126
I think Amazon is punishing me for not having Prime, and is holding on to my phone order. I *will not* give a company money for the privledge of giving them money. Anyway, I needed a phone for a couple weeks til Amazon thinks I learned my lesson, so I did some shopping over the weekend. After debating over various options, I bought a Kyocera Hydro Reach with Boost Mobile at Walmart yesterday.

The screen uses Gorilla Glass' trailer park cousin, Monkey Plastic, and the whole thing has a light weight cheap feel. The 5MP potato cam has Superspud Technology®, so the pictures kind of look like they did when you saw the object originally, with bonus bits of color peppered throughout. The phone itself is water/dust resistant

The 1ghz, 1gb phone with lolipop is surprisingly smooth. It's no speed demon, but I haven't had any hitching so far, though the storage access does seem to hang some times. The battery is non-removable, but it does take a microsd card up to 64gb(perfect use for my old card). It's irritating not having root, and google wants to be in every bit of it. I can't even turn off their keyboard, and I'm constantly bumping a google softkey when I'm typing in landscape(using hackers keyboard) and it pops up in my face. Of course there's also non-removable crapware taking up room and cpu cycles.

The 5" screen is very low res(540x960), but I don't find it too off-putting. Small images really look jagged, but I'm sure it helps performance which is more important on a device of this caliber. Boost comes with free music streaming(doesn't count against high speed data) if you download the partner spyware adware feature filled apps, and a bunch of the big players are supported, but I'll just use my 64gb card, and my own music. Hotspot is easy to setup, and fully supported.

Overall, I actually love the phone, especially for what I paid(phone, 1 month's service($35 for 2gb high speed/unlimited everything), and a bag of jerky for $85). It would probably be a good phone for a younger child. It's a shame about the camera cause otherwise it would make a good vacation phone, especially for traveling in unfriendly areas. Hide your sd card when going through customs, then put it in when you get to a safer area. If you lose the phone, it doesn't matter much.

It'll get me through the next couple weeks, and I may keep the service depending on how fast the 2g service is, and if it's truly unlimited. Torrents and debian updates don't care how fast the connection is, so it'll be a good supplement to the work provided plan.

Oh, and I finally got to try termux(a terminal with package management). I haven't had a chace to use it yet, but I'm looking forward to having nano for editing files, and it helps take the sting out of missimg root.
 

Raduque

Lifer
Aug 22, 2004
13,140
138
106
Well, that thing is sounds even worse than the LG Tribute HD I bought a couple months ago (also on Boost, $39.99 at Best Buy). 1.2ghz quad, 5" 720p display, 1.5gb ram, 16gb internal, and Android 6.0.1. It has the same PotatoMatic camera and plastic screen, but at least it won't shatter if you drop it.

Works pretty good if you just need a basic phone that can do extra stuff, albeit a little slowly.

Edit: It has the tap-on/tap-off feature, too.
 

lxskllr

No Lifer
Nov 30, 2004
59,667
10,179
126
The lg phone was in the running, but I think I rejected it for having a 4.5" screen, but it's hard to remember. I looked at numerous phones from a few providers, and didn't want to get myself into feature creep, where you keep adding $10 to the price paid, and end up with a phone that still isn't that great, but costs 75% of what a good used phone costs. I'm completely happy with what I got vs what I paid. It meets minimum standards for not much money. It would be hard justifying something better for a couple weeks of use.
 

Raduque

Lifer
Aug 22, 2004
13,140
138
106
I think the Tribute (no HD) had the 4.5" display. They were side by side on the display, same price. I agree though with that entire post. The LG made a great phone for the purpose I needed it for, and it would've been a just fine phone to use as a daily driver.