| Review of the Kyocera 3245 |
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The Kyocera 3245 is a discontinued phone from Bell Mobility, with a monochrome display and a candy bar body. That isn’t to say that either design element is necessarily a bad thing, so long as the overall execution is done well. The 3245 is an okay phone as far as design is concerned, but it doesn’t stand out in any way. This review is mostly for those considering it as a used phone. Last Updated: 12-Jul-2004 |
Before reading this review, please read Some Thoughts on Phone Reviewing.
General
The shape of the phone is a bit odd,
in that it tapers to from a wide top to a skinner bottom. The change in width
isn’t that severe, nor is having a fat top section necessarily an odd departure
for candy bar phones. However, the rounded contours and the bulging keypad give
you the distinct impression that it was inflated too much. Looks aside, but the
skinnier bottom end of the 3245 makes it a bit difficult to and manipulate with
one hand. You always feel like you’re going to drop it.
The keypad, which bulges in some places, and “sucks in” at others, is among the
worst designs I’ve tried in quite some time. The keys are tiny and closely
spaced, they press too hard, and they seem to be less responsive than they
actually are. This isn’t to say that I haven’t experienced worse keypads,
because I certainly have, but there are just too many excellent examples out
there to accept this one as anything but mediocre. Like all such handicaps
however, I’m sure you’d get used to it given time.
I wasn’t too pleased with the screen either. Manufacturers have been making
monochrome displays for ages, and so there’s no excuse why this one couldn’t
have been excellent. Instead the font is skinny and tough to see at a glance,
and the contrast is very poor, even with the darkness turned up full. The blue
backlight only makes matters worse. The only good thing about it, compared to
many color screens, is that you can easily see it in direct and indirect
sunlight.
The 3245 includes a speakerphone feature, and while it isn’t up to the level of
any of the Motorola iDEN models, it is actually quite useable compared to many
other lame speakerphone implementations I’ve tried on other phones. The volume
of the speaker isn’t all that loud, but it’s actually loud enough to hear in
moderately noisy environments, such as a reasonably quiet car. The quality of
the speaker is also surprisingly good. The microphone sensitivity is boosted,
thus it picks up voices well up to about 3 or 4 feet from the phone. However,
outgoing sound quality is no better than with the standard microphone, and that
isn’t very good to begin with (more on that later).
The same speaker is used to produce the ringtones, of which only 3 are
non-musical. Even those 3 ringtones are rather faint, and it is difficult to
hear the phone ring in noisy environments such as the food court at your local
mall, or while walking down a busy street. The phone does include a vibrate
feature, but like virtually all phones these days it is rather anemic. You can
feel it if the phone makes contact with your body, but if the phone is floating
in a pocket, or insulated from you by thick clothing, you can’t feel it.
The phonebook is excellent, as has been the case with all of the Kyocera models
I’ve thus far tested. Not only does each phonebook entry include multiple phones
numbers, but you can REUSE icons. This means that if you contact has 3 or 4 home
numbers, or 3 or 4 cell phone numbers, you aren’t forced to use non-applicable
icons when you run out of the limited number that other phones force you to use.
The phone also includes space for a street address, email address, URL, and a
text note.
Phonebook searching capabilities are also top-notch, as has been the case with
other Kyocera models. As you press numeric keys, the phone displays the closest
match in the phonebook as though you were using T9 to enter a name. You can also
type in just part of a phone number (ANY PART) and have the phone quickly find
all listings that include that numeric string. Finding entries is therefore fast
and easy, and I’ve often said that these features should be on ALL PHONES.
The voice recorder is, like in most CDMA phones, a complete waste of time. You
can’t do the one thing that voice recorders are great at, which is recording
what your caller has to say. The 3245, like many CDMA phones I’ve tested, allows
only the recording of your own voice, and in fact the voice recorder is OFF
LIMITS during a call, even to record just yourself. Clearly this isn’t a legal
requirement, since virtually all GSM and iDEN phones can record your caller, as
can other CDMA phones (such as the recently-tested LG
4600). Those misgivings aside however, the sound quality of the voice
recorder is excellent, and you can play back the recordings on the speaker.
The rest of the phone’s features are fairly run-of-the-mill. It includes a few
interesting games, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to refer to games as
such on a monochrome phone. Fortunately the display does support multiple gray
levels, and so the images displayed during the games are at least more detailed
than would be possible on a strictly black-and-white display.
RF
Performance and Audio Quality
RF
performance is excellent, as we’ve come to expect from Kyocera. The phone
completely blows away my old ST-7868W,
which can’t even begin to match the prowess of the 3245 in weak signal areas.
This applies to connecting the call, and to providing error-free audio during a
call. Over-the-road performance is also excellent, as the phone keeps the audio
disruptions to a minimum.
Incoming audio quality is quite nice, but it’s
just a bit too bassy. This gives the phone a rather boomy quality that can be
annoying under some circumstances, and with some types of voices. Audio volume
is acceptably loud, and the phone includes Kyocera’s excellent Smart Sound
feature that automatically boosts the level of quiet callers so that they sound
similar in volume to loud callers.
Outgoing sound quality was a huge disappointment after the excellent showing I
got from the Kyocera Slider. However, Kyocera
doesn’t appear to be consistent in this aspect, as the Blade has terrible
outgoing sound quality too. Even in quiet environments the 3245 couldn’t even
come close to touching the great outgoing quality of the LG 4600. When the
background gets noisy, the 3245 gets worse. This has been a common complaint of
most CDMA phones, but if the LG 4600 teaches us anything, it’s that no one can
JUSTIFY the horrible sound quality by blaming it on CDMA or the
EVRC CODEC.
While this phone exhibits some of the great features I’ve come to expect from
Kyocera, it suffers from horrible outgoing audio quality, a mediocre monochrome
screen, a crippled voice recorder, and a nasty little keypad. Because it has
such terrific RF and reasonably good incoming sound quality however, I would
hesitate to say that this phone is a bust. Outgoing sound isn’t something that
YOU have to put up with, and the screen isn’t especially important if you use
the phone mostly to take calls. So long as the faint ringers don’t present a
problem for you, and you can justify the other shortcomings, the 3245 is a
fairly solid little phone that looks quite durable. I personally would give is a
miss, simply because it annoys me in far too many ways.
Someone recently asked me if I would choose the Kyocera Slider over the 3245. It
didn’t take long for me to say that the Slider is by far a better phone, despite
some of its user interface weaknesses. The slider was one phone that actually
got me excited about the possibility of using CDMA as my main network. While
that never happened, I can’t say I experienced anything near that kind of
reaction to the 3245.
