Review: Kyocera Jet for Amp'd
Browser
The Amp'd Live service features excellent layout and design, with the requisite graphical flourish whenever a menu is rendered. There are video advertisements for Live content that play in the top of the screen while the various menu options are displayed below. Amp'd Live provides a large and growing library of streamed and downloadable content, including various types of ringtones, full music tracks, custom wallpapers, video clips covering news, sports, and entertainment. There is also a fair amount of exclusive content, such as live streamed UFC fights and AMA supercross races.
In our testing, there were only a few issues using the Amp'd Live browser. While watching a UFC fight, the phone did run into buffering errors where the video stalled. It was impressive that in the course of 70 minutes of viewing there were less than a handful of these moments, and none of them lasted more than five seconds. There were also times when we were unable to locate certain content within the Amp'd Live menus, even though the video or download in question was featured in the advertisement at the top of the display.
There is a web browser included under the 'mobile internet' heading of the Amp'd Live service. Instead of browsing WAP sites sized for the Jet's small screen, the included browser uses desktop websites and tries to render them for the small screen, however it does not do as good a job as opera mini or others. Because it is browsing desktop sites, it is slow to respond and load web content. It also lacks any control over the size of text on-screen, which when combined with the poor fit-to-screen view made our phone scoop homepage extremely long to traverse.
Customization
The options for customization on the Jet are focused more on media than on layout or design. The home screen layout is fixed save for the ability to enter a personal banner message in place of a normal network operator name. That said, the Amp'd Live service presents a number of options for home screen wallpaper, as well as allowing you to select a photo taken with the Jet's camera.
Ringtones and message alerts can all be personalized using Amp'd Live content, with different alerts for calls, PTT, MMS, and text messages. Individual contacts can also be assigned particular alerts. Multiple types of ringtones are offered, including polyphonic tones, spoken alerts (Dan...pick up the phone), and popular music tones. There is a distinction made between music ringtones and music downloads. Songs purchased for playback are not available to be used as ringtones. One feature that quickly became a guilty pleasure during our testing were the selection of sound effects offered for opening and closing the phone. They also proved functional, as the audio response helped train us to open and close the manual slider easily.
File Management
File management on the Jet is a segmented experience. Pictures and video are handled by the gallery application, and music downloads are essentially controlled by the media player. In addition, the Jet only allows music and video downloads to be stored on the transflash card. Therefore the file management controls only apply to photos and videos recorded with the phone, and the only option in this instance is to move those files from the internal memory onto the transflash card.
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