Review: Kyocera DuraPlus for Sprint

It is amazing that in this day & age of automated test systems and well-established quality control procedures that neither Kyocera's nor Sprint's quality assurance programs caught this major blunder before it got shipped to all the stores and customers. It's so obvious the minute you try to use a DuraPlus in speakerphone mode that there is a major problem.

Based on my short time with the DuraPlus, I do think if Sprint & Kyocera can get on top of this speaker/microphone problem, they will have a good phone on their hands. If they are lucky, it is a software problem that can be fixed by updating each phone. If it's a hardware component defect or a manufacturing defect, they'll have to recall them.

SPRINT, ARE YOU LISTENING?: Have Motorola take the i365, replace the iDEN-specific chips with CDMA-specific chips, tweak the antenna and whatever else just needs tweaking to be compatible, and call it the "s365" ("s" for Sprint"). The i365 already has a reputation as one of the best Nextel bar phones ever built (just look at the customer ratings on your own website, and the rest of the internet). You really should have stuck with Motorola for your Sprint Direct Connect rollout. Changing TWO major aspects at once (from iDEN to CDMA and from Moto to Kyocera) was soooo NOT SMART.