Yet again Kyocera Rio has brought for its Cricket customers a touch-screen choice which certainly is not the best option for music fans. The phone consists of good aspects such as a responsive and friendly touch screen along with an integrated navigation and e-mail application system. However, the good aspects of the phone are packed in a cheap phone design which does not offer a good call quality and consists of an irritable music player.

Design

Unfortunately the design of the phone is pretty cheap as it has the typical black build and curved corners along with a lustrous plastic creasing on the back concealment which has excessively shiny inflections of silver. Its weight has a measure of 3.2 ounces, its height 4.1 inches, its width 2.2 inches and its thickness 0.5 inches. The responsive touch screen of the Rio E3100 is 2.8 inch resistive and it gives a lively and vibrant experience. It has the QVGA resolution which provides support to a 262,000 colors and is 240 x 320 pixels.

The virtual QWERTY keyboard of the phone is good enough but a little small which makes it best for those with slim and slender fingertips. The QWERTY keyboard can be achieved both on demand mode and half mode but it is better to use it in demand mode. You can add applications to the screen and also drag and move them around the screen. The phone screen also consists of four shortcut controls that give way to your message inbox, launch applications, address book and phone menu. Four hardware buttons are found underneath the display screen that surrounds the Select key. The power button is located on the right back side of the phone that is also used for locking and unlocking the phone screen. On the left side of the phone are the volume rocker and the camera shutter, the Micro-USB charging port on the top of the phone along with a 3.5 mm headset jack. On the back of the phone is the camera lens that is 1.3 megapixels and below the cover is a microSD card slot which is capable of accepting 16 GB of expandable memory.

Features and Performance

The address book of the phone accepts up to 500 entries that provides space for multiple numbers of each contact along with their street address, e-mail address, URL address, a note and an IM handle. You can also assign an image and a caller ringtone to your contact. The phone features e-mail and provides support to multiple accounts such as Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL. The Cricket Web browser consists of a search bar, two screen modes, bookmarking ability and image saving option. Other than that the phone features basic applications including an alarm, a stopwatch, a world clock, a calendar, a tip calculator, a memo pad, a voice recorder, Bluetooth, MMS and a timer.

On testing the voice quality of the phone, it resulted to be not very perfect. Speakerphone was average and the callers reported to hear a very distant voice. Cricket Web roaming occurs at 2.5 G (1X) network which is not so good for 3G users. The phone has a rated battery life of 5.5 hours talk time and up to 14 days of standby time and according to the FCC radiation tests the digital SAR is 1.06 watts per kilogram.