This week at CTIA Kyocera has announced a couple of new phones, the Hydro and the Rise. It would appear that Kyocera is looking to break back into the US Market with these new announcements. Hopefully, Kyocera may well be able to bring something fresh to the market, much like they have done in the past.
With the Hydro I doubt that there going to making any headlines but, what we have here is a waterproof phone that can withstand submersion for half an hour up at up to a meter’s depth. Pretty impressive, no? What isn’t overly impressive however, is the overall spec of the handset, it’s no superphone, far from it, in fact. What we do get with the Kyocera Hydro is a Qualcomm MSM8655 SoC with its CPU clocked at an aging 1Ghz coupled with a relatively low-resolution 3.5″ display (at 480×320 no less) as well as a 3.2 MegaPixel snapper round back and a battery on the smaller side at 1500-maH. The Hydro also packs a meagre 512MB of RAM, 2GB of internal storage (with a MicroSD Slot) Bluetooth 2.1+ EDR and 802.11n Wi-Fi. All this doesn’t amount to much at all these days but, where Kyocera has shown some promise is that the LCD is a lovely IPS panel, meaning that colours and viewing angles should surpass the quality of regular TFT-displays doing the rounds. It’s reported that the Hydro will come with some sorts of battery-saving enhancements along with what looks like an untouched version of Ice Cream Sandwich, which is always nice to see. However, with no carrier named there’s no telling what might happen to the software between now and launch. Speaking of carriers, the device is CDMA – with EV-DO Rev. A confirmed. My money’s on Sprint, seeing as they’ve partnered with Kyocera in the past but, who knows at this point? Check out the video below for hands-on thanks to the folks at Engadget.
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[Source: Engadget]