Why You Can Trust CNET Casio G'zOne Brigade (Verizon Wireless) review: Casio G'zOne Brigade (Verizon Wireless)
Casio G'zOne Brigade (Verizon Wireless)
Casio G'zOne Brigade (Verizon Wireless)
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Casio has made a name for itself in the ruggedized handset market with the G'zOne series of phones. From the Type-V to the more recent G'zOne Rock, these phones are military-certified to take a beating and keep on ticking. Now Casio has finally released its first-ever ruggedized messaging phone--probably the first of its kind--dubbed the Casio G'zOne Brigade. With its tough exterior, full QWERTY keyboard, and multimedia features, the Brigade is built for industrial workers, but will please anyone who wants a durable and reliable messaging handset. The Casio G'zOne Brigade is $249.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate and a new two-year service agreement.
Design
The Casio G'zOne Brigade follows in the footsteps of its predecessors with a chunky style that looks like it came out of the '90s. At 4.4 inches long by 2.2 inches wide by 0.9 inch thick, it is, quite frankly, huge. The Brigade weighs in at a whopping 6 ounces, making this a phone you definitely don't want in your shirt pocket. It's rectangular with sharp angled corners and is wrapped in a hard plastic shell with a soft-touch coating. There's a unique crocodile-style texture on the back for extra grip. Its ports are covered with a rubber stopper, and the battery cover has a locking mechanism to prevent water damage. Indeed, the Brigade is MIL-STD-810F-certified to withstand water, shock, dust, immersion, vibration, salt, fog, humidity, solar radiation, high altitude, and extreme temperatures.
On the front of the Brigade is a round external display reminiscent of a stopwatch. The 1.2-inch 128x96-pixel monochrome PM-OLED display is similar to that on previous G'zOne phones, and displays the typical date, time, caller ID, battery, and signal strength information. Even though it's a monochrome display, you can still use it as a camera viewfinder, but it's black and white and rather choppy. You can access a limited menu of items from the external display: Messaging, Contacts, Recent Calls, Bluetooth, Keyguard, and Media. You can adjust the backlight time and the clock appearance.
Underneath that are the external navigation controls. They consist of a circular toggle in the middle with a center select key, plus shortcut keys to a new text message, a favorite contacts list, the camera/camcorder, and the flashlight/speaker. Below that are the Send, Clear/Voice command, End/Power keys, and the number keypad. The keys are well-spaced apart and are raised above the surface at a rather steep angle so it's easy to dial by feel.
On the left spine are the charger jack, the headset jack, push-to-talk button, the volume rocker, and the music player shortcut key. On the back is the camera lens plus an LED flash that can also be a flashlight. Behind the battery cover is the microSD card slot.
Turn the phone 90 degrees to the right, flip it open, and you'll reveal a full QWERTY keyboard plus a 2.9-inch 400x240-pixel TFT display. It only supports up to 65,000 colors, but images still look vibrant and sharp. You can adjust the backlight time, the clock format, the size of both the dial fonts and the menu fonts, and the layout of the main menu. You can also rearrange the icons around if you wish.
Below that are two soft keys plus the aforementioned keyboard. It has four rows of keys complete with a number row, so it's quite spacious. Along the right of the keyboard are a few navigation controls like a small circular toggle with a center select key, a Clear/Voice command key, and the Send and End/Power keys. You will also find shortcut keys for a new text message, the camera, the camcorder, and the speakerphone on the keyboard. The keys are raised above the surface with a nice domed feel, and we always like it when the spacebar is in the middle of the keyboard for easier typing. It's a small thing, but we also like that there's a dedicated period key.
Features
The Brigade has a 500-entry phone book with room in each entry for four numbers, two e-mail addresses, an instant-messaging screen name, and a street address. You can organize them into groups, associate them with a photo for caller ID, or with one of 20 polyphonic ringtones. Other basics include a vibrate mode, a speakerphone, text and multimedia messaging, an alarm clock, a calendar, a calculator, a stopwatch, a countdown timer, a world clock, and a notepad. The Brigade is also compatible with Verizon's Push-to-Talk network.
More-advanced features include voice commands, instant messaging (Windows Live, Yahoo, and AOL), a wireless Web browser, and e-mail. You can choose either mobile e-mail, which is an actual e-mail app that lets you send and receive POP and IMAP mail, or mobile Web e-mail, which simply leads you to a mobile Web page with access to popular Web mail services like Hotmail or Yahoo Mail. There's also corporate e-mail support, which is especially useful if your employer uses OWA (Outlook Web Access). You also get stereo Bluetooth, USB mass storage, PC syncing, Visual Voice Mail support, and GPS with support for VZ Navigator's turn-by-turn directions and Verizon's Family Locator service. The Brigade also has Field Force Manager, a resource management tool designed to let employers keep in touch with their field workers. Furthermore, there's a document viewer that'll let you read most Microsoft Office documents.
But the Brigade isn't all work and no play; it also comes with Verizon's full suite of multimedia and broadband services. It has EV-DO Rev. A, so you get access to Verizon's V Cast Video and V Cast Music with Rhapsody. The latter lets you download songs over the air for $1.99 per track, which also includes a simultaneous download to the PC. Appropriately, the Brigade comes with a music player as well. The interface is not quite as polished as we would like, since it's so tied with the V Cast Music interface. Features of the music player include the ability to set songs on repeat and shuffle, plus you can create and edit playlists on the fly. You can load your own songs to the Brigade via a microSD card (up to 16GB); the player supports MP3, WMA, and unprotected AAC and AAC+ file formats.
The Brigade has quite an advanced 3.2-megapixel camera. It can take pictures in five resolutions (2,048x1,536 pixels; 2,048x1,232 pixels; 1,600x1,200 pixels; 1,280x960 pixels; and 640x480 pixels), and you can also choose from six Best Shot modes (Person, Scenery, Night View, Sepia, Black and White, and Negative) to get the right shot. Other settings include a macro mode, a flash, white-balance presets, a self-timer, multishot mode, autofocus, brightness, and the shutter sound. You can also toggle the display timeout. We like that you can easily access many of these camera settings just by pressing a few shortcut keys on the keyboard.
Photo quality was pretty good, but if we did not use flash, the images would appear a tad overcast with a slight orange tinge. Flash does a good job at brightening up most photos, though, so that's good enough for us. The built-in video camera can record videos in 320x240-pixel resolution in either 60 seconds for MMS or up to 60 minutes, if there's available storage. The settings are similar to that of the still camera.
Just like other phones, you can customize the Brigade with a variety of wallpaper, themes, and ringtones. You can get more from Verizon via the wireless Web browser. The Brigade doesn't come with any games, but you can buy them via the browser as well.
Performance
We tested the Casio G'zOne Brigade in San Francisco using Verizon Wireless. We were very impressed with the call quality overall. We heard our callers clearly with hardly any static. The same goes for calls via the speakerphone, though the voice quality sounded a little harsher.
On their end, callers said they could hear us quite well, too. The voice quality did seem a little tinny and machine-like, but there was little distortion. Again, voice quality via speakerphone sounded a lot harsher, but we still sounded loud and clear, so we think call quality was good on the whole.
Audio quality was fine for the most part. The speakers don't make for great listening--it sounds quite hollow and thin--but if you use a headset, it sounds pretty good.
The EV-DO Rev. A speeds were impressive. We downloaded a 1.2MB song in just 32 seconds, and we didn't suffer a lot of buffering time when streaming video. The video quality was still pixelated and choppy however.
The Casio G'zOne Brigade has a rated battery life of 6 hours talk time and 3.7 days standby time. The Brigade has a talk time of 6 hours and 55 minutes. According to the FCC, the Brigade has a digital SAR of 0.813 watt per kilogram.