[General Topics] robbbzilla:
The Kyocera Hydro Life is certainly not going to impress anyone who looks at it. It is not bad looking at all but the materials do not look premium despite the build quality being rather good. There is a gunmetal plastic edge that goes around the sides and edges of the phone except for the very top and bottom middle section which is made of black plastic. It has a rather thick profile and the plastic edges form a protective lip around the face of the screen. The back removable textured black plastic back is a nice feature and adds a nice feel and grip to the phone and gives a more premium feel. If they would have used this same type of plastic on all the areas where black plastic is used it would have greatly improved the feel and quality of the phone. There is a single mono speaker on the back left top of the phone. Next to the speaker is the camera and flash. On the left side is the volume rocker and on top is the power button. There is a micro usb port on the bottom and microphone. On the top left of the power button is the ear phone jack. There are no speakers or holes or cut outs on the glass face of the phone. Instead the glass itself is used as a speaker to transmit sound directly to your ear drum.

So the appearance of the phone is decent but nothing special. The 4.5 qHD screen has a quarter HD resolution and packs 245 pixel density which is really very good. The screen brightness is fine. Actually the screen is very acceptable in this price range. The colors seem a bit washed out with the adaptive brightness on,when turned off the problem is resolved. The screen resolution looks great and there is never a time I can see pixels. The colors are vibrant as well and the viewing angles are not bad. The screen is very important on a smart phone and while this display is not the best it certainly looks great to me.

The sound quality of the phone loudspeaker is about as good and maybe a little bit louder than my Nexus 5. Call quality is fine.

What makes this phone shine is the Snapdragon 200 1.2 GHZ quad core processor coupled with 1.5 gigs of ram and an 8 gb rom. I have not found another phone anywhere near the price of this phone with these specs. If you disable several of the built in apps and replace the stock launcher the phone is rather quick. Take it a step further and root the device and it is very snappy. The biggest problem with this phone is the fact it has a locked bootloader and very little if any developer support. I had to try several methods to root the phone and there is no custom recovery or roms available yet for this phone. It also has an antiquated release of Android Jellybean??? So if you want the latest software without bloat and custom rom options then this phone is not for you. Of course for those of us without a choice I am hopeful the devs here at XDA will start working on some of these budget android phones for those of us who simply can't afford the higher end models. That being said , rooting this phone really makes a huge difference and the performance with a custom launcher is really impressive. A Vanilla Android install would improve things even more.

The camera works o.k. It is not great but the 5 megapixels is fine. In low light the camera is not very good but it works.

Battery life is great once you either disable or remove the bloateware. I can go all day using navigation and browsing the web and using netflix heavily. The battery is removable and there is additional slot for a 32gb micro sd card.

All in all this is a great device regardless of price. It is certainly not some luxury device but it does have a nice feature set and having waterproof and military ruggedness built in is an extra plus. Knowing it could survive a spill or some rain is nice. It says impact resistant glass but who knows if that means scratch resistant so I would be careful with the screen.

All I can say is for $30 I am blown away by the quality and specs of this phone. The outdated software, bad camera, lack of developer support could certainly stop a lot of people from considering a pretty awesome piece of affordable hardware. A custom kernel with the ability to overclock the snapdragon 200 and a custom rom could make up for some of the software limitations and add even more performance.

I hope my review inspires more people to try this great phone and for the devs to pick one up too!! ;)