What Camera Sensor Is In The Kyocera Jax

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Kyocera Jax S1300 (Virgin Mobile) review: Kyocera Jax S1300 (Virgin Mobile)

Kyocera Jax S1300 (Virgin Mobile)

Kent German

Senior Managing Editor / Features

Kent is a senior managing editor at CNET News. A veteran of CNET since 2003, he reviewed the first iPhone and has worked in both the London and San Francisco offices. When non working, he'due south planning his next vacation, walking his dog, or watching planes country at the airport (aye, really).

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The Kyocera Jax for Virgin Mobile is the reverse of the carrier's Kyocera X-tc. While the X-tc offers a midrange feature prepare and a full keyboard for texting, the Jax is merely a simple handset for making calls. The basic processed bar design holds no surprises and the feature set offers little beyond the standard personal organizer. Call quality is variable, so we'd just recommend information technology for very occasional utilize. On the upside, you can get it for as cheap equally $9.99.

The Good

The Kyocera Jax is compact and easy to use. Its feature set includes vocalism dialing.

The Bad

The Kyocera Jax's pattern isn't durable and its display is low-resolution. As well, telephone call quality was variable.

The Lesser Line

The Kyocera Jax is a functional cell phone, but there are meliorate basic handsets in Virgin mobile's lineup.

Design
The Kyocera Jax couldn't have a simpler design. The candy bar handset is basically a black rectangle with little to distract from its straight lines and sharp corners. The plastic peel doesn't feel sturdy, then the danger-prone should be careful. We also noticed that the battery comprehend wobbled just a bit. At four.29 inches by 1.73 inches past 0.51 inch and two.v ounces, the Jax is portable and lightweight.

The Jax has a minimalist design.

The 1.8-inch brandish supports just 65,000 colors (160x128 pixels). Its low resolution ways that graphics aren't very sharp and colors are pretty muted. The menus, bachelor in grid and list styles, are intuitive. You lot can modify the display's brightness, contrast, and backlighting fourth dimension. The volume rocker on the left spine is too thin for our tastes. It is piece of cake to observe when on a call, but it could be bigger. On the right spine you'll find a 2.5mm headset jack and a microUSB charger port.

The Jax'southward battery comprehend felt like it could pop off without warning.

The navigation array is a mixed bag. While the circular toggle and primal OK button are spacious and easy to use, the remaining controls are pocket-sized. They include two soft keys, a defended speakerphone push button, a back key, and the Talk and Terminate/power controls. The keypad buttons have their proficient and bad points as well. While the keys are raised higher up the surface of the phone, their plastic feel didn't do keen for banging out long texts. The keys are backlit for dialing in the nighttime.

The Jax's book rocker is likewise thin.

Features
The Jax'due south phone book holds 250 contacts with room in each entry for six phone numbers, two e-mail addresses, two URLs, a street address, and notes. You can save callers to groups, but photo and ringtone caller ID is available only for groups. The Jax comes with nine ringtones and an array of graphics. If you want to use your ain photos, yous'll accept to find a fashion to become them on the phone.

Features include a vibrate manner, text and multimedia messaging, a speakerphone, a vocalisation memo recorder, a calendar, an warning clock, a tip reckoner, a world clock, a timer, a stopwatch, a memo pad, and a calculator. Vocalization dialing is an unexpected bonus, but the feature list ends there.

You can personalize the Jax with a diverseness of color themes, banners, wallpaper, and screensavers. More options and additional ringtones are available from Virgin'south VXL Internet portal over the WAP 2.0 Web browser. The Jax comes with one game (Brick Attack), but yous can always buy more titles.

Performance
We tested the dual-band (CDMA 800/1900) in San Francisco. As a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO), the Jax operates on Dart'south network. Telephone call quality was decent on the whole, though it was non without its problems. On the upside, the signal was strong and free of interference. Also, voices sounded natural most of the time.

On the downside, the book was rather low. Information technology wasn't a trouble when speaking inside, but nosotros had trouble hearing in noisy environments. Even worse, when nosotros turned the book up to the highest levels, the audio was distorted.

On their stop, callers said we sounded fine, though a couple of our friends reported that the Jax picked upwards a fair amount of wind noise. All could tell that we were using a cell telephone, but that's non unusual. Speakerphone calls were only adequate. We could hear well plenty, just the sound was rather tinny. The Jax has a rated battery life of 3.3 hours talk time and 8.3 days standby time. Our tests showed a talk time of two hours and 56 minutes.