The unusual dual-screen Kyocera Echo phone ($299 minus a $100 mail-in rebate) is a great idea executed incompletely. Plenty of people want to do two things at once, or at least flip between tasks. That's why we love windows on PCs, and why the "card" interface on HP's WebOS has always been so brilliant. The Echo could bring this fluidity to Android, but the clunky software on this smartphone kills the buzz.
Physical Design
Physically, the Echo is the weirdest phone I've seen in a while. It starts out looking like a rather thick candy-bar phone at 4.5 by 2.2 by .67 inches (HWD) and a hefty 6.8 ounces, with a black bezel around its 3.5-inch 800-by-480 screen, which is thicker on the right side than on the left.
The darn thing actually accordions open, on a unique hinge, leading a second screen to sort of swing out into place. You need three distinct motions to expand the Echo: First, pull the top screen back and away; second, swivel it down so it's flat and parallel with the second screen, and third, push it into place. It's the third bit that
always got me while testing the phone; if you don't push the screen into place, it will continue to wiggle.
That hinge looks fragile, but it isn't. I pulled the Echo with some force, dropped it, and even tried to snap the hinge off, and this thing is very solidly—if awkwardly—built. The screens are durable too, made of Gorilla Glass.
Specifications
- Service Provider
- Sprint
- Operating System
- Android OS
- Screen Size
- 3.5 inches
- Screen Details
- Two 3.5-inch, 800-by-480 TFT LCD capacitive touch screens
- Camera
- Yes
- Network
- CDMA
- Bands
- 850, 1900
- High-Speed Data
- 1xRTT, EVDO Rev A
- Processor Speed
- 1 GHz
More interestingly, the two screens can "simul-task"—and I'll get to that functionality below.
Call Quality, Reception, and Battery Life
Kyocera has swallowed Sanyo, which was once known for Sprint phones with spectacular voice quality. The results are mixed. I didn't get great RF reception on the Echo, and voice quality in the earpiece was just average. While the earpiece volume is loud enough, voices sounded computer-like in the earpiece and muddled on the other end of a call. The speakerphone, on the other hand, is classic Sanyo—a metal grille with loud, sharp sound that you can easily use outdoors.
The phone paired easily with an Aliph Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars) for calls, music and sound from videos, and the voice-dialing system activated and worked accurately over Bluetooth.
The Echo is a 3G, CDMA EVDO Rev A, 850/1900MHz phone with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g (not n). It works as a Wi-Fi hotspot, although it doesn't have Sprint's 4G WiMAX network on board. That may be a blessing in disguise, as WiMAX plus two screens would put a serious hit on the battery.
In my tests in Manhattan, I got fairly slow speeds on the 3G network. It was fine for Web browsing and e-mail, but video streaming through Sprint TV and YouTube frequently stalled, and took a long time to buffer. Using the Ookla speed test app I couldn't get speeds over 600Kbps, which explains the problem. The slow Internet defeated the promise of VueQue, a built-in app which plays one YouTube video while buffering another; it never got far enough through the first app to spend much time buffering the second.
Battery life will be a concern here if you like to use both screens at once. It took only two and a half hours of dual-screen video, plus half an hour of puttering around, to kill the 1370 mAh battery. I estimated six to seven hours of single screen use. This makes sense: Dual-screen mode uses up about double the power. Thankfully, Kyocera includes a second battery, and a separate battery charger.
Apps, Android and Dual Screen Use
This dual-screen thing is really promising, but it's botched by incomplete, inadequate and sometimes buggy software.
The Echo is an Android 2.2 phone with a first-generation 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU. The QSD8250 processor sometimes isn't up to the task of running two screens at once. Some of this is CPU speed; if you're trying to flip between scrolling two Web pages, there can be a noticeable delay. Part of the problem is the GPU. Qualcomm's Adreno 200 graphics processor just isn't powerful enough for this screen resolution, turning in an absolutely lousy Neocore graphics benchmark score of 18.6 frames per second spanned over both screens.
There are very few apps that can actually act independently on the two screens. For many, you're stuck with Tablet Mode, which is like using a very large single-screen phone with an annoying bezel in the middle. When you need a touch keyboard it takes over the entire bottom screen, which is nice, since it's easy to type on. But I haven't seen a huge demand for devices with a square, five-inch screen, bezel or no bezel.
Seven of the built-in apps can simultask, operating independently on the two screens. They are the browser, contact book, e-mail (but not Gmail, and not the attachment viewer), gallery, SMS, dialer, and VueQue, a custom YouTube app. But even those don't work as well together as I'd like. For instance, I can't throw a URL from an e-mail on one screen to a browser on another, or open a YouTube link in an e-mail message on one screen in the VueQue app on another.
I found this really frustrating. The Echo could be the phone for social-networkers, e-mail maniacs, and viral-video fans. But the Jibe social networking software doesn't simultask at all, and the two screens often don't work together.
There are currently two games that use the dual-screen mode right: The Sims and a pool game. In the pool game, you can see different views of the table on the two screens. In The Sims, one screen shows your character's environment, and the other shows her status and controls.
A few other apps, such as the gallery and VueQue YouTube player, also show their controls on the bottom screen and what you're playing on the top screen. (You can expand videos to cover both screens, but that bezel gets bothersome.)
Even within the custom-written apps, I had some stability problems. Trying to pinch-zoom the browser, I got a crash stating: "The process android.process.intergratedapp has stopped unexpectedly."Also, frankly, I'm very worried about Android fragmentation here. Kyocera has worked hard to say that this is a platform, releasing an SDK and subtly promising more products ahead. But this is the mostly heavily customized version of Android I've seen from a mainstream manufacturer, and I can't help but think this phone will have a long road to getting any Android upgrades.
Multimedia
The Echo comes with 1GB of on-board memory and an 8GB MicroSD card tucked into a slot on the side; the phone supports cards up to 32GB. The Echo's 5-megapixel camera delivers bright, sharp outdoor photos. But it takes a while to lock in focus, with more than a second of shutter delay. This may be another example of the older Qualcomm chipset biting off more than it can chew. Low-light photos showed some slow-shutter blur.
The video camera mode records 720p high-def videos, but they're hideously overexposed and only 12 frames per second. A Medium Resolution 640-by-480 video mode is much smoother.
The Echo plays back all the typical audio file formats, including OGG, and you can sync your music using the free doubleTwist software. Video is more restricted—the device plays MP4 and H.264, but not XVID or DIVX, and none of my high-def files played even though I could kick the phone into a "big-screen" mode where videos take over the full, double screen. The bizarro square aspect ratio of the 4.7-inch double screen doesn't fit most video files, anyway.
Conclusions
The Kyocera Echo is an audacious, exciting new idea. But the execution doesn't grab me. Nobody wants a tablet with a bezel in the middle. But we absolutely do want a phone that makes it easier to do multiple things at once, such as manage multiple Web pages or view e-mails and attachments without having to flip back and forth. The Echo almost does this—but not quite. The simultasking apps don't work well enough together, there aren't enough of them, and the phone doesn't have enough GPU power to handle the huge double screen.
If there were a dozen great dual-screen games, that would be an argument for the Echo—but I'm worried that may not be possible because of the poor graphics benchmark performance. If Gmail and social-networking software worked in Simultasking mode, you could have the best Twitter/Facebook/e-mail phone ever. But they don't, so you don't.
This all puts the Kyocera Echo under the banner of "fascinating misfire." I hope Kyocera doesn't lose faith in this idea, because it really stands apart. But hopefully the company will work on making version 2 let us do more things at once.
Sprint users have better conventional options. For a big screen, the HTC EVO 4G ($199, 4 stars) is still the gold standard, and the dual-core EVO 3D is just around the corner. If you want a big keyboard, go for the Samsung Epic 4G ($299, 4 stars). The Echo's cool idea just doesn't measure up to these smoother, better-executed phones.
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