Review: Kyocera DuraMax for Sprint

I'm sorry, but from the review, it sounds like there are so many things that us iDEN folks are accustomed to having perfect right out of the bat, that it's a wonder that this phone ever made it out of the lab and onto store shelves. Why do I say that??? Here's why...

The phone's volume on the ear piece and loud speaker are both weak at best. If you're doing anything outside where there is sound above say 70 decibels (which happens often on even "quiet" construction sites), then this phone will be useless.

Secondly, signal strength. As the review stated, his iDEN device worked IN his basement (and everywhere else) whereas this Kyocera barely worked indoors, and failed in the basement. Outdoors should improve things, but that's not going to instill confidence in people when it comes to Sprint switching over the 800 and 900 Mhz spectrum over to CDMA (iDEN penetrated virtually everything, this CDMA signal is far weaker from the sound of it).

Then there's actual coverage. Sprint's CDMA network still is NOT 100% EVDO rev 0, let alone rev A. So, despite CDMA being a "superior" network, PTT (which is 1 of the 2 main selling points of this phone) becomes essentially useless since getting anything short of EVDO rev A won't let it work! iDEN at least didn't have that issue: if you had any sort of signal, you could do everything: call, PTT, messaging, web.

The only real highlight was that this phone does appear to be a solid mil-spec specimen. While that is great, I think the problems above bring into serious doubt whether Sprint is even remotely serious about trying to convert us iDEN users that are left over to their CDMA. So far, to me, it appears that once iDEN is shut off, the remaining iDEN folks will simply move to Verizon instead of jumping onto the Sprint CDMA side. Unless Sprint offers this phone to any and all current iDEN users as a 100% FREE swap (with no activation fee), I can't see even 1 iDEN user bothering with this phone...or with Sprint in general for much longer.