Review: Kyocera DuraPlus for Sprint

Quoted excerpt from Eric's review:
"Sound:
I was disappointed in the DuraPlus's calling capabilities. Phone calls sounded terrible. They were full of noise and interference. Worse, the earpiece was absolutely anemic. It barely produced any volume at all, even when set to the maximum volume. Hoping for the speakerphone to save you? Don't get your hopes up. It's awful as well. Given this phone's sheer size and bulk, there's no excuse for sub-par voice performance. Voice is this phone's meat-and-potatoes feature, and it fails badly." (end quote)

I tried two DuraPlus phones in a row, both had excellent sound quality in normal "phone-to-the-ear" conversations, but both failed miserably on speakerphone. Very weak sound, very "muddy" sound in speakerphone mode. Apparently the speakerphone mic is either defective, or poorly designed. At any rate, this problem was a show-stopper for me, and I returned the second DuraPlus and had my i58sr reactivated. The i58sr (almost ten years old and going strong) has a phenominal speakerphone that puts the DuraPlus to absolute shame.

THe other real flub with this unit is that "One-Touch PTT" is NOT truly one-touch. When the phone is set to One-Touch PTT, and the screen has gone to "screensaver" mode, the first push of the PTT button merely brings it out of sleep mode, and it takes a SECOND push to initiate the PTT call. All of our Nextel Motorola iDEN phones with One-Touch PTT all work exactly as expected, even in screensaver mode the first press of the PTT button connects the DC call.

Too bad Kyocera released these units this way, it's an otherwise great phone and I'd be willing to switch from iDEN to the new Sprint Direct Connect, if this phone was not defective.

I give credit to all of the Sprint customer service agents I dealt with, they were all friendly, helpful, courteous and took care of me.