Kyocera Brio (Sprint)

Hey everyone, I'm Jessica Dolcourt for CNET, and today I'm taking a first look at the Kyocera Brio. This is a new phone for Sprint and it's free with a new 2-year contract. That's kind of one of the most exciting things about this phone. It has a candy-bar form factor that I actually quite like. It's got a 4-row QWERTY keyboard on it. And there's cool angled buttons below the display, but unfortunately, as good as they look, they're a little bit hard to press and they didn't snap back the way that I wanted and the way that I expected. So, as I mentioned, this is a keyboard here that's very compact. It will be a little bit small for those of you with larger hands. So also got these ridged keys which are always really good for grip, but in practice, sometimes my fingers slipped off and sometimes it worked, but it wasn't quite as satisfying as I would have wanted. The screen here is your basic 2.2-inch QVGA display. It's already set to landscape mode, which is pretty normal for a phone of this design. It is not a smartphone, but then again, you don't really need a smartphone all the time, and if you're one of those people, then you don't have to worry about data plan commitment. On the back, you've got a 1.3-megapixel camera. It takes some pretty bad photos. They really weren't great. There's also a 32-gigabyte card slot behind the back cover here. It only has a 2.5-millimeter headset jack, but it isn't a music phone and there is no music player on board, so I can't get too upset about that. There are definitely some good things about this phone. There's email access for one, and that's the Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, your corporate email, pretty much works with any web mail. And even though the interface is a little bit junky, it works pretty well. Also, if you've got a memory card installed, you can add attachments like photos, and that was really me. Also, call quality on this phone was pretty good, so that's definitely a plus. For the bad, the data is really slow. The small screen is not really great for perusing the internet, but it is useable. In some, this is not the world's greatest phone, but I have seen and even owned worst free phones, plus with the good call quality with this QWERTY keyboard, those are really good perks for somebody who's just looking to save some money and have a basic phone around to make calls. So again, this is the Kyocera Brio for Sprint. I'm Jessica Dolcourt for CNET. You can read more about this phone on CNET.com.