REVIEW: Kyocera Hydro Icon - Waterproof Android Phone! By OSReviews

Hey folks, your OS reviews you're watching our video first look and a quick review of the curacies hydro icon. This is a prepaid, android device that came out on boost mobile actually two years ago, so it's not completely new to the market, but you can still find on Amazon for a relatively low cost of sub 60 and for that price, you're still getting a pretty good device. Now all the hydro phones are waterproof, and this is no exception. You can dump this into water up to 30 minutes in 3.28 feet of water, so you can take it swimming, take it to the beach and then record video footage underwater. If you want to use it as a rugged camera of sorts, because it does have an 8, megapixel, autofocus camera on the back, and otherwise it's an android device that runs on version, 4.3, jelly bean, so a little outdated, but it does have a 4.5 inch display, which is 720p and impact resistant. In addition, it offers the snapdragon 400 processors, so it's a quad-core device with one gig of ram.

So, as far as being a budget android phone is concerned, really not bad specs, because snapdragon 400 is still quite competitive in the mid to low tier of android products today. So at this price point again, you are getting a very rugged well-built and a decently performing product. So taking a quick look at some other design elements of this phone, it does offer a smart sonic, receiver technology so again as a rugged device. Sometimes you might be wearing a helmet if you're in construction zone- and you still want to answer phone calls. You can just pop this onto your head, and it uses the transceiver technology to basically use bone conduction to send the audio signal into your head, as opposed to a traditional speaker grill.

So you can basically put this anywhere near your head, and you will hear what's going on when answering calls, which is a pretty cool technology that curacies pioneered a few years back. It supports 4g, LTE and there's Wi-Fi GPS and Bluetooth on board expandable memory via a micros card slot. Behind the battery cover front camera here are 2 megapixels. Behind the display we have access to capacitive keys, which are backlit for back home and multitasking features. The 8, megapixel camera loudspeaker and led flash, and this phone does also do offer wireless charging, although it's not using the QI standards a little proprietary, but there is wireless charging capability in addition to NFC onboard.

So, basically, all the connectivity options are here in a low-cost phone, which is pretty exciting to see, especially on a budget rugged device. So the size of the phone is pretty comfortable. Obviously it doesn't have the smallest bezels in the world, but it's comfortable. The frame is probably similar to what you find on a 5-inch phone, so it melts into your hand fairly. Well, it's not a huge phone, and it's comfortable in your pocket as well.

The screen itself is fairly bright. Colors are vibrant and still visible outdoors, since it gets very bright and for the most part, it's also very sensitive, which is nice. You can see that for the most part, there is a fairly clean installation of android 4.3, although curacies did try to put some of their custom, widgets and apps on here. So there's a little of a skin that enhances the usability, but you can always kind of install your own launcher if you don't like what you're seeing here, and it's definitely not as obtrusive as some other skins we've seen from manufacturers. There's the typical slide down notification drawer, and you can see this version originally came also with boost and there's also, you can tap here to access more of your settings, such as turning on Wi-Fi Bluetooth, GPS, those things and then, of course, multitasking to swipe open and close your applications.

It's pretty zippy as far as a main navigation around the main home screen UI and even launching a few apps, you won't notice any slow down. So again, the snapdragon 400 is still very much a good processor on a low tier device and for general day-to-day use such as calling doing a few text messages browsing the web. You have experienced no problems at all. The typical Google apps are also here, which you can organize using folders, and they include access to the Google Chrome browser which is pretty good. It gives you tap browsing just like on a desktop.

It is included out of the box, which makes typing a little easier as well, but let's just start and type away, accept for chrome, we're not going to log in at the moment, and we're going to try the New York times as a good benchmark of a complex site, and a lot of phones might struggle with this, because there are many flash elements that are hard to render and, of course, a lot of ads as well. But you can see here that loading times are nearly instantaneous, at least on the mobile version, so for a better idea of how it fares we're going to try to toggle into the desktop mode. It's still pretty zippy, fairly respectable takes a little longer. Now you can see some elements are still loading as we browse, but for the most part the page is loaded. There are no checkerboard patterns, as I scroll quickly between the top and the bottom and zooming in automatically flows the text after a few seconds, so browsing really isn't bad at all.

You know it's not nearly as great as a flagship phone, but you know with a quad-core chipset. It still makes for a pretty powerful browser. So you can still use this to read to watch videos access YouTube. Those things can all be done directly using the Chrome browser without any problems. As far as tabs are concerned, opening up, I would say, six to eight tags- tabs pose no issue for this product, but, as I started to multitask more heavily, there was definitely a lot more sluggishness and lag, so you want to keep you know not as many tabs open in the background.

So let's take a look at some other apps on here. Pretty typical Gmail services, Google Maps, google photos and there's a YouTube client for a more optimized version of watching videos faster, and you can see we can reorganize the apps pretty easily as far as bloatware or pre-installed apps by curacies. There are quite a few there's access to a flashlight feature which activates the torch on the back. It makes sense, since this is a rugged phone. They want to also include a few utility options on here, eco-mode, which makes the battery last longer and a full rundown on this phone took roughly, I would say a day and a half to complete.

So it's decent as far as battery life is concerned, lasted me a little longer, just because I didn't use it quite as much and with the device having a smaller screen, not the fastest processor. Those are all things that help the battery last a little longer as well. Otherwise, if we take a quick look at the camera, next 8 megapixels, it's nothing to write home about, and the interface that curacies offers, isn't the cleanest or the most advanced that we'd like to see, but it does a job and for some quick snaps you'll be fairly satisfied with what you see, there's again autofocus, which is pretty fast, and it does that automatically. I can stop an image, and it saves it within just a few seconds so pretty speedy. As far as capturing multiple images that we just took here, you can see that colors are fairly accurate, and it captures a nice amount of light.

But details are a little uh missing. It gets a little fuzzy if I zoom all the way in not as sharp as the image could be, but all in all really not a bad camera and again for a phone that isn't designed for taking images as a central focus. It does. Furthermore, it does a decent job, there's also the front facing camera, which is again two megapixels, and it works pretty well it's bright, which makes it a good option even for capturing selfies and for doing skype and video chats with friends and family. Taking a look at some other custom apps on here we have access to some emergency services like emergency alerts, ice which are also geared towards the demographic of this phone, which is going to be people who often take their devices into more dangerous work environments, and they need something more rugged.

So there's also help at hand if something goes awry and there's also again some additional things manifold, which allows you to enhance the text and make it larger on the screen. There's a sound recorder that uses a microphone here is very, very good same thing with call quality. They did a great job here. This is typically a feature that is good across the board on rugged phones. You'll find that call quality is excellent, just because they really want to make sure the microphone is loud and clean sounding, and this was no exception.

Reception was also quite strong and callers couldn't really detect that we were using a smartphone as opposed to a home phone or a LAN phone. So that's always a good sign. Call quality again is excellent. So as a phone, it definitely works well, other things from boost, including mobile ID, or you can customize it with packs or themes on top of android there's. Also, a panorama function which is, in my opinion, should have been integrated into the main camera app, instead of being a separate app, but at least it does work, and you can capture.

You know some larger environmental shots just by kind of stretching and using the accelerometer. You can see it's a little finicky and the interface is definitely not as beautiful as some third-party apps we've seen since it's designed, in my opinion, in a hurry by cure era themselves. So software side of things not quite as good. Definitely they could have cleaned things up a little, but at least you have a lot of options to play around with and, of course the beauty of android is. It leaves a lot of customization up to you, the user, there's also the typical play store for downloading all of your favorite games and there's also weather client on here as well.

When it comes to gaming, the snapdragon 400 chipset performs well so for most demanding games. It can still be played on here all the titles that you would want to can be downloaded, and they will run fine. I wouldn't, you know, do that all the time since the battery will drain pretty quickly and also frame rates, aren't going to be quite as smooth on your latest bleeding edge smartphones, but you know they do run. You'll probably have to wait a two or three seconds longer for them to completely load, but it's still a respectable chipset, and it's a quad-core chipset. So that's nice to note some of the extra features that we tested out, including GPS, received pretty decent results.

It was quick to find the signal, so that was nice even indoors. Wireless charging uses again that proprietary technology, so it doesn't work with every single QI charger that we tried it with. But nonetheless it's a nice feature. If you want to pick up those optional accessories and just pop this onto a desk and begin that process NFC pretty, pretty typical. You can use this to launch wallet, pay services and essentially use this to have payment or sharing information between other products that have NFC on board as well.

So pretty nice feature as well basic apps, located on the bottom of the display here, including phone people, contacts messaging and browser. These can also be rearranged if you want to- and you can also kind of pinch out to look at all of your home screens on the main page. So everything is pretty well-thought-out, and the functions are basically as expected. I guess I'll leave you guys on a quick look of some of the optional widgets that are installed on here. We have the typical ones and then some curacao-centric ones, and how they customize the eco-mode, the clock- and they give you a bit more of diversity there, also one for Wi-Fi hotspot and finally, finally, for the wallpapers, we have some ID wallpapers from boost and sprint and then under typical wallpapers, there's some by curacies.

That really shows off the vibrancy of the display. So again it use sips technology, it's bright. It's easy and saturated, it's not quite as dramatic as an AMOLED panel, but there's a ton of detail in here. So if we launch into a better image that shows off some crisp detail on the screen, you really tell how much detail it tries to capture within one frame, it's impressive for a 720p panel and compared to 1080p. You really won't notice it at all.

Since the screen size is a little smaller at 4.5 inches, you still get quite a bit of pixels per inch for watching videos and enjoying media content with at the end of the day, I am a fan of this device. I think that the Cura?ao did a great job with the hydro icon. It's a waterproof phone, it's a rugged phone with that sonic receiver for calling people with, but at the same time it's fairly elegant, lightweight and performs, as you would want. There are newer, curs era hydro devices on the market, but the point I want to make is that it doesn't necessarily improve that much on what the hydro icon brought. I think that the hydra icon is one of the few phones that curacies brought out at the time that tried to pack all the features underneath the hood for a mid-end device, and so even today it still stands up and performs quite well versus a lot of their newer offerings, which still only has one gig of ram or the snapdragon 400 processors and maybe even takes out the wireless charging and NFC.

So this phone, even today, still represents a great uh device. If you like curious products, waterproofing works great, even though you know I wouldn't try to purposely get it wet every single time. But again the nice thing about a rugged phone is that you can drop it. You can take it everywhere with you without a case and still be confident that it will most likely survive and the performance on this one also stands up pretty well for most consumers out there. You can check out more details about the hydro icon in our official written review, but for now this has been our video thanks for watching here at OS reviews.

Source : OSReviews