Smartphone for Outdoor Enthusiasts

KYOCERA TORQUE

Rugged smartphones meant for the trailblazer and the survivalist in all of us certainly aren’t rare, Kyocera recently announced the Torque, a mid-range smartphone that’s encased in a thick hard plastic shell that can absorb energy when dropped. The 4-inch IPS display with a 800×480 resolution smartphone could be your cell phone who like the outdoors activities.

The first thing you’ll notice with the Torque is its rugged look. It has a textured hard plastic Dura-Grip casing that protects it from drops, and every port is covered with a flap to keep water and dust out. The battery cover can come off, however, and it’s held on with a rather large screw that only requires a quarter turn to “unlock” it, so to speak. The cover is made out of a slightly-flexible rubber material to make it easy to pop off.

It’s also water resistant and impervious to dust, and while the average hiker could easily take advantage of the device, the company also targets it towards construction workers and even parents who have small kids that can be more than a little rough with toys. The device meets Military Standard 810G, which applies to protection from dust, shock, vibration, temperature, rain, low pressure, solar radiation, and immersion in water for up to 30 minutes in up to 1 meter of water.

Its operating system uses Android Ice Cream Sandwich and able to connect to the 4G network. The processor installed on this phone is a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz accompanied with 1GB of RAM. The phone has a microSD card slot that accepts up to 32GB of additional storage. The Torque sports a 5MP camera on the back, with a 1.3MP front-facing camera.

Underneath the rear plate is a 2,500 mAh battery that powers the show, and it’s a slightly larger battery than we initially expected, but seeing how the Torque is meant for the adventurer, it’s critical to have a phone that can last all day. The battery is able to serve up to 19 hours of talks.

As for ports and buttons, the Torque doesn’t rely on touch-based soft buttons. The phone consists of all physical buttons, including the three navigation buttons on the front. On the right side, there’s a dedicated camera button that acts as a shutter button, but it won’t open up the camera app itself. On the right side, there’s a volume rocker and a big yellow button for push-to-talk communication. On the top is the power button and a toggle button for turning the push-to-talk speaker on and off. Also on the top is the headphone jack in the middle. Then, on the bottom you have the microUSB port and the microphone.

As for the earpiece, it’s actually built into the glass display, and it relies on vibrations to deliver sound to your ear. For the clarity matters, this vibration technology which directly transmits the sound waves to the eardrum. This makes the user able to listen clearly even in noisy atmosphere. *** [EKA | FROM VARIOUS SOURCES | SLASH GEAR | BUDI | KORAN TEMPO 4184] 
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