The new Kyocera Brigadier mobile phone, available with Verizon Wireless, is ready for the elements and abuse of the great outdoors. Verizon sent us a phone complete with a testing kit including a container, a bag of rocks and some steel wool to try and make a mark. Below is an illustrated guide to our test and it held up very well.
Below is the clean, fresh phone.
The first test, to be fair, happened last night where it sat completely submerged in the container pictured below overnight. You’ll notice, the phone does not float. As with waterproof cases for phones, when the waterproof membrane protecting the microphone gets wet it’s horrible at transmitting sound. The recipient (who was in the other room) of my phone call after pulling the phone from the water said my voice was completely unintelligible. Interestingly I could understand them. I then had a listen on the dry phone. Their voice was indeed just a grumble of sound and no words could be distinguished or understood. Blowing into the microphone cavity cleared the trapped water and from there a conversation could be had though still terribly muffled. The membrane took about half an hour to dry before a clear conversation could be had.
The next test was to dump most of the water out and add the bag of rocks to the container. Sealed with a lid, I shook the phone, rocks and water for about 30 seconds.
After pulling the phone from the rocks and water you can see where the rocks were hitting the screen leaving a matrix of dots. A little wipe with my shirt in the middle showed the sapphire screen was unaffected.
To clean the screen the rest of the way I used the included steel wool. The screen polished right up.
Next came the drop tests. I placed the phone in a small burlap sack and a handful of stones just to see what happened. The phone is rated for drops of four feet onto hard surfaces, like the street. It did fine at four feet so I continued to drop the phone from higher and higher until I was tossing the phone in the sack of rocks well above my head. Finally, at a toss of about 30 feet the phone caved. It looks like it hit right on the corner and splintered the screen.
Aside from the ruggedness of the phone, I didn’t find any other particularly outstanding attributes. It has buttons all around the sides including power, volume controls, camera shutter and a programmable quick access button to whatever is most important to you. The face of the phone has three buttons: menu, home and back. I’m not an Android user so I’m not sure if that’s pretty standard or what. But, if rugged is your focus and you can’t be bothered to buy and use a waterproof case, this is your phone.
