Kyocera 7135 (Verizon Wireless)

Performance of Kyocera 7135 (Verizon Wireless)

Design: 7 Features: 8 Performance: 7

The Kyocera's bright display serves up 65,000 colors.

The 7135's performance met all of our expectations in every area. Its 33MHz DragonBall processor and 16MB of internal RAM provide plenty of gusto for common Palm applications, plus room to store them.

While this model's screen isn't state of the art, the 65,000-color display is one of the best available on a Palm-based smart phone. Viewed side by side with Handspring's Treo 270 and Samsung's SPH-i330, the Kyocera's 160x160-pixel screen was the brightest of the three.

Browsing the wireless Web on the 7135 had a few downs but a surprising number of ups. Graphics-laden pages loaded slowly and were hard to navigate, but lighter pages rendered faster. Using the text-only EudoraWeb, we noticed that pages popped up with alacrity--at least for a phone.

Making and receiving calls with the Kyocera went without a hitch; reception in San Francisco and New York was good. The sound was typically distortion-free and loud enough to hear. We even drove through a San Francisco tunnel that cut out FM-radio signals without dropping the call.

The Kyocera's battery mostly lived up to its rated times in our performance tests. The phone lasted 3 hours, 12 minutes in our talk-time test, slightly short of its rated 3 hours, 30 minutes. But the 7130 did outtalk the Samsung i330 by 12 minutes, although the i330 comes with two batteries, and we used its lower-capacity one. The 7135 met it rated standby time of 120 hours.