CES 2021: Kyocera DuraForce Ultra 5G UW, rugged, drop/water proof, Snapdragon 765G, push to talk By Charbax

And we are live hi, I'm Curtis wick with Kyocera's product planning department, and I'm here today to introduce you to something new coming in 2021, so you have unbreakable and unbreakable phone. That's uh, waterproof drop proof uh, because all these iPhones and Samsung's people have they break in like five minutes, I'm joking, but there's many of them like uh, it's your, very, very careful with your phone if it has to survive one year. So yours is just not going to break. That's right! Our design is all about durability um. So we focus on and have over the years produced more than 100 devices that are waterproof but being dropped. Proof and rugged is kind of a core tenant for Kyocera.

So what kind of technology goes into to making that possible? Uh? If I go over to this video here, you're talking about also like your market, is also enterprise. People doing construction work stuff like that yeah. We do focus certainly on more of a b2b centric environment, so construction, mining, public safety. So there's a lot of enterprise, environment customers that are core for us, but also we realize there's a lot of customers out there that live the very active lifestyle, and so we also focus on them. So it's it serves both environments and um uh.

Do you have a lot of customers in like construction, business and stuff like that, or I don't have exact numbers to that? But yes, I mean that's again. Our one of our core focuses is on the enterprise environment and, as I mentioned, public safety, so law enforcement, firefighters, ems. They work in very hazardous environments on occasion, so having a device that they know that if they drop it they can pick it up and keep right on going, and so this new uh is it already announced in terms of the CPU as a good, snapdragon CPU. Yes, the new device will be using the snapdragon 765 g, so that supports 5g millimeter wave with our partner Verizon. So we've got the gaming capabilities, although it's not necessarily a gaming device, we're taking advantage of the capability of that chipset to provide for enhanced graphics and just faster processing of information and uh.

You also have like a flip phone. Is it popular on the market? What is this uh, this style phone, that super unbreakable? Yes, the aura extreme is our rugged flip phone. This device has been out for almost a year now very popular. Actually, if you go online and look at reviews for clamshell type devices, you know feature phones. This one is very highly rated.

It takes a beating and just keeps right on going and part of the core design, as you can see on this image, is that black and white button on the side for push to talk so mission critical use cases. You know where people need that quick communication push to talk is really core to the device. Nice yeah, the video they show them washing it there, and that is also something very important to whether it's the feature phone or smartphone in this day and age is just keeping your device clean and healthy and um it like shouldn't, be every phone that should be like drop proof and uh. There's uh, there 's's a certain market of uh, doing the unbreakable phones right but um you are this. Is this technology that's coming from the Japanese, Kyocera yeah and that's coming out of Japan? I mean obviously our build quality, I think is second to none, and it's a key focus to have that durability.

I agree it would be nice if all the devices out there were indestructible, but nothing's really indestructible. We do go through a great deal of effort in designing the product to take that kind of beating with the new product. We live up to mil standard 810h so for the upcoming product, the workforce ultra 5g. It supports a10h, so one and a half meters onto concrete so and be able to survive and one of the other core things of that is the battery design itself. We've actually developed in partnership with our battery partners a durable battery.

Even though the battery is internal, it's not user removable. The battery is also designed to take that kind of abuse. So you know we back it up with a two year, warranty nice, and then you have this video showing how to wash the phone. This is your previous model right and uh, correct, uh, there's a there's, a special technique going on there or what he's just using a mild soap um what we actually in this day and age because of the antiviral and antimicrobial aspects of keeping devices clean. What we're really recommending now is, rather than soap, is to use a solution of 70 alcohol.

That way, you can disinfect your phone, so you could drop it into like vodka or something like that. You probably could but yeah again, we just recommend isopropyl alcohol, all right, and then I'm coming back to this. This is your trailer right. The CES 2021 trailer so uh. How soon is the device gonna launch with 5g and um uh? Are you talking about price or um? Well, that's unfortunate price and the actual launch timing is it's coming very, very soon, but we don't dictate that uh, that's in partnership with our carrier, customer Verizon um, so the device is coming very soon from an engineering perspective, we're ready to roll um, we're just finalizing things, to get it out the door and on the streets.

So that's a little teaser video you had there. We have another video waiting in the wings. So when the device launches we have a much, much broader scope, video that shows the device capability. Uh Kyocera uh has many other phones in Japan right that are more like consumer kind of phones or in the US, and are you also selling in Europe is mostly the rugged ones or um everything we're doing at this point is rugged in Japan there are some products geared around children and seniors, but even those we try, and you know, focus on a more rugged design. So you know these devices you see for the US marketplace.

They are definitely geared around the enterprise environment and active lifestyle uh, so you're, definitely not uh many manufacturing uh. What you call it: uh, not scarcity, but there's this thing that people talk about the where some companies are actually designing the devices to fail. So yours could actually, last years our average life cycle, we actually see the trend in the rugged space of two plus years. That's why we give a two-year warranty, and we back it up, but we actually see often devices that go three or more and we also see a lot of customers that are repeat customers because of that uh. What do you include in the warranty like uh anything happens or there's a limit other than you, obviously destroying the device? Um we've we cover, even the display.

I mean one of the most common things to get damaged. Is the display um? If it's not obvious abuse, if we happen to have a device come in, that has a damaged display, we'll often cover it. We don't guarantee it 100, but even our display glass on the previous model and the upcoming model uses sapphire. This is a proprietary solution that we provide for what we call sapphire shield sapphire on a most scale of hardness is rated. Nine.

A diamond is ten, so it is from a mineral hardness perspective, one of the hardest materials on the planet, so it is takes a beating and does really well scratching it. It's almost completely impervious to scratches, and we even use that same sapphire glass over our camera, so protecting the camera so that you always have the ability to take a good, clean image as part of the design nice. So that's a really nice, it doesn't scratch, and you can't, if you use a diamond, a diamond is harder than sapphire. You can scratch it, but because the wedding rings right all right and um. There's one comment asking no Laura wants support.

I don't know if any phones is doing this kind of stuff. Now that's some other stuff. They who knows what happens in the future. There could be more and more new kind of uh connectivity, but that's up to the uh roadmap of uh Qualcomm right what they might support. It's a combination.

I mean we work, obviously with Qualcomm and others um. A lot of it is also with our carrier partners and what technologies they're going to license and launch for a network. So we are doing things with enterprise-grade Wi-Fi um. What we are finding often is the case where you know cons. You know large, manufacturing or warehousing environments where cellular coverage may be questionable in a building.

We do actually support handing off from Wi-Fi access point to access point, so they can utilize the device in a warehousing environment off network and then still transition back and forth onto the wireless network. Uh do you so are there something specific in that has to be considered when it's not just waterproof, but it's actually uh. You can submerge it on the two meters of water for 30 minutes. Is that what it is? That's correct, so there's some uh, definitely like the ports covered or what kind of considerations well we do have. We do have port covers that have seals, although the actual ports themselves are internally sealed as well.

The sim card slot memory card slot is one area that you do have a seal there. So as long as all the compartments are closed, this device literally, not only is it waterproof to six and a half feet for 30 minutes. The idea is really we promote using it um. So you can show one of those devices you have there yeah. This is this: is the upcoming device, the perforce ultra 5g? So this is the new one.

That's coming and for the camera is a great example. We have an underwater mode, um oops. Let me get out of that. Sorry. If I go to underwater mode now, what happens, and you'll see some prompts that come up to tell you how to use it, because the touch screen itself does not work underwater other than just a little title bar area, but you can use the other physical keys on the phone to actually use the camera underwater.

So we promote that type of use case. It's not just about being waterproof. It's about being water. Use so you can have some fun with it, but your scuba dive uh should not be too deep right, um. Well, it's not recommended for salt water.

Salt water is corrosive um, I mean if you do get it into salt water. You know you should rinse it out thoroughly and let it dry um. But I mean you with your kids in the pool you're. You know playing fetch with your ROG with a ball in the pool that kind of thing we like to see that kind of use case, or just you know out you know out and about using it in a real world condition you get in the rain. The mud, the sleet, the snow, not gonna, be a problem.

Could you show the device a little more like? Is it secret or uh? What so there's good camera on it? There's a good display. Um! It's got a 24 megapixel main camera. That camera is a four cell camera. So in low light environments it will combine cells to create a supercell to improve the lighting performance in low light. There's a 16 megapixel, wide-angle camera and a time-of-flight sensor for fast autofocus and depth of field and then on the front, there's actually an 8 megapixel, front-facing camera.

You can kind of see over here in the corner so for doing your selfies. You've got that front facing camera as well and uh. I see on the back, there's a Verizon logo. So this is your partner. It is going to be launching with Verizon and uh, so they have a best 5g network in the US, or probably wow right, yeah they're, a key partner for us and yeah.

I think one of the main things there is the support for millimeter wave um, so ultra-wide band, as they call it, we've actually done tests and different environments throughout the country, so the service is commercially available. I've actually done tests here in San Diego California, where I hit 1.96 gigabits per second down link. So it's fast nice. This is like a nearly like fiber internet in your pocket. This is yeah yeah.

We actually had a power outage recently due to some high winds and so internet connectivity became a challenge and I used the phone as a hot spot with the 5g back haul, and it was better than my home internet. So it's quite impressive uh is this uh, uh other things that you can say is an upgrade compared to the last year or oh boy. There's a lot of things. I mean this. This device is our toughest loudest and fastest device we've ever made, so we've had a long history of creating durable devices this one again because we work so much with you know outdoor environments and noisy environments, whether it's you know being used in a manufacturing facility or by a police officer on the side of a highway.

We have dual front-facing speakers with a smart amplifier, so it provides the best, sound and loudest sound. So in a noisy environment you can still use the device. There are four microphones and those microphones are a combination of being able to use sound focus to determine what is the source of the desired sound versus undesirable, sound background noise, and so we cancel out that background noise. So you can communicate in that poor environment again the speed on this thing, with Verizon's ultra-wideband network and the Qualcomm 765g processor, this thing's extremely fast um and graphics capabilities. You know one of the things we look at for that enterprise environment is supporting what's called BIM or building information.

Modeling um BIM modeling actually provides for the ability to interact between an architect and the construction job site and look at different things in real time and collaborate on a job in virtual real time between you know the designer and the guys that are actually building it. So it's pretty cool nice uh. It's its it's great to see, phones that are not just like the same, as all the other ones like uh. There's another opportunity to do something special right, and it seems uh Kyocera is trying to focus on specific markets or like specific uh, more demands something extra. This uh, I'm I'm actually showing you showing the last year's model stuff right.

So people don't think right new one right, but I guess you're building on top of that and doing just more and more exactly and that's another feature actually that existed in last year's model and also is in this new model is something unique Kyocera that we call the action overlay camera for those people that enjoy that active lifestyle. If you're into motorcycle riding or off-road biking, we have a mode of the camera that overlays additional information. So you can get your speed, your track, g-forces weather information, altitude information- and this is all overlaid on top of either still image or video. So it's a pretty cool function for people that like to be out there and just live in the wildlife. But what is this uh headset that I see them using their uh? Is this just like using a Bluetooth, headset um? Well, these are a little different.

These actually support push-to-talk um. So this is this. Is there are Bluetooth ones, you'll see wired ones as well? You know in a covert environment or even like this gentleman on the right hand, side. Where he's obviously on a construction site, you want a relatively hands-free operation. You can use push to talk on the device like that image is showing, but with a headset jack on this device is a five pole, jack versus a traditional four poles.

That fifth pole allows the key signal for push to talk without interrupting stereo audio, so you've got left and right and your microphone and a key signal. So now you can use push to talk that one showed the headset where it's kind of a covert use case. You know obviously, law enforcement public safety. They can have that, as part of you know what they're wearing and have the little push-to-talk button in their hand, so for private security, that's a great option where they can just squeeze it in the palm of their hand and talk and release um, so that that's part of our design is to focus on that push-to-talk capability, uh! Isn't it like push-to-talk in apps, like WhatsApp and uh, these kinds of apps? Is it possible to use your push your button to actually push to talk in those apps, or where does the push-to-talk go in the specific app that you have or um in the case of products? Well, many of the carriers have their designated applications. We support.

Many though there 's are applications, I mean Verizon uses, what's called push-to-talk plus that is their designated push-to-talk application. There are many over-the-top apps that you can download and use. The biggest issue is compatibility between apps so, depending on what your need is the odds are we can support the application and the push type functionality within it all right and uh. Here I see another example of people using for scanning inventory. Is there like a special grip, a case that suitable for that or something that or there's actually what's being shown? There is an accessory platform that we've worked on developing where you have detachable accessories, so you can use the camera right now to scan a barcode or a qr code.

That's a pretty commonplace thing, but in a warehousing environment you want the ability to use RFID or scanning from a greater distance. So there are detachable accessories to support that, along with that is, we have, you know most of the buttons on the device, I'm gonna, and I'm talking about the ultra here, but this is also true to our legacy models, where we have all the different buttons. You have a SOS button. You have the PTT button on the side. Furthermore, you've got a camera key down on this end, but all these keys are actually user programmable.

So, along with those accessories, you can configure those buttons to do different things, so you can take advantage of what is your use case? What is your need in a business, and we have various solutions from the barcode scanners to extended batteries mounting systems for forklifts or other vehicles? There's a lot of different things that you can do with that and then configuring those keys to support whatever application. You need and there's one comment in the chat from Luis Gonzalez. When I used to work in construction, those each phones came through uh, they are impossible to break, and then he's asking, honestly. They should make a tough laptop so you're. Thinking about that.

Why don't you make if it's not out of our wheelhouse? We certainly could um what we have been doing right now in Japan, we've developed a tablet. That's used for both education there's a couple variations of it, so we use it in education um. It's also used as a know, kiosk tablet in the restaurant business um pretty common place. Nowadays, you go and if you can even go into a restaurant, but you go in, and you can just use the tablet to place your order so that that type of thing is something we are doing um doing an actual full-blown laptop. That's again, it's something we probably could do, but it just hasn't been the demand for it.

Well, there's the new uh, uh arm chipsets. I think it would be nice to have an arm like a Qualcomm, CPU, and they're already a partner, and they could help you to provide the perfect Windows 10 uh on arm with 20 or 30-hour battery life. Then I hope there would be like a sunlight, readable display. That would be. You know like not the regular LCD OLED, but something different.

That's really outdoor use, and you could store it against the wall. It'd be fine, I'm joking, that you people shouldn't but uh, and why not? Yeah again, it's not outside the realm of possibility, not that it's currently in our plan, I mean one of the things and again with this device, the ultra. I hold it at an angle, so you can see it, so you don't get the reflectivity, but the display on this device, as I mentioned, had that sapphire shield, but it's also an ultra bright display. So using this in daylight is not a problem and again that focus on building information modeling and using this on a job site or just enjoying outdoor use cases, whether you're, camping or motorcycle riding, whatever you're doing visibility of this display is phenomenal. So there's a high knit good brightness going up, 800 800! Yes, that's more than an iPhone! Yes, it is.

I don't know how much an iPhone gets, but uh, uh, so uh bright, bright display, and it's not a tiny battery. You have there right, oh boy, I forget off top my head now, it's time to think of so many other things. It might be: 40, 47.50, 40, so nearly 5 000 million Williams, but uh. It's also a question of the high the quality of the battery and how many times it'll recharge, but for at least two years. You'll have good battery life, hopefully and well, some something else that we've actually done, so there's a lot of battery saving techniques out there.

Um android itself has a lot of battery saving functions um, but we've actually done a few things beyond what is just standard android, or you know commonplace in the market. We've looked at it um, and you'll see this even in the automotive industry. With you know, electric vehicles now they've as we've studied more and more of the behavior of the battery cell. You know if you charge it to 100 or if you consistently charge it with very little use. It actually degrades the overall life cycle.

So we've developed a battery care mode that you can enable, and it's user selectable, but what it will do is actually stop the charging at 85 percent, and it won't allow it to charge further until you go below that 85. That extends the actual life cycle of the battery significantly. Now, if you need, if you know on a given day, you need a hundred percent of your battery, you can always turn it off and charge it all the way up and go about your day. But we look at the overall life cycle and trying to extend that life of the battery beyond what you would really even consider the normal life of a phone all right so uh. How was the CES for you? Were you doing a booth, or you were showing to some media? Well, it was a virtual event this year, obviously with covet 19, it's a little challenging for all of us.

You know working from home and doing things strictly in a virtual world, but we did. We did uh the big event with which was pep com at the kickoff of CES, and so we were. We had a virtual booth within pep com and working with all the media to show off our upcoming product nice and what's next so this, because this is coming out q1, this is coming very soon. I can't, I don't have the exact time very soon. Uh we're right on the edge, so it's it'll be here very soon, um other things.

Beyond that I mean there are. There are always new things in the works, and we'll see what uh comes next, but the upcoming product is the workforce ultra 5g all right. So thanks, thanks a lot of thanks for talking about this new product. I really like that. Uh some devices don't need to break uh so quickly, especially when maybe they're not uh they're, like people are spending their money on it, and it'd be nice.

If all these consumer electronics didn't have to break so quickly, but also for people to be more serious and professional right and yeah again, our goal- and you know Kyocera you know- was founded in 1959 focused on in Kyoto. Japan focused on ceramics, that's the name Kyocera. If you look at what we have done over the years and again, I think I mentioned it earlier: we've we've created over a hundred devices that were commercially launched that are waterproof, and it just keeps getting better and better, and we're. You know we are focused on living your lifestyle, you shouldn't have to worry about it and I, like those hinges, but the hinge device doesn't have the android right. It is a proprietary build based off of android, but it's not a full android operating system.

It's that's designed around being a feature phone, so maybe it's also more affordable. Furthermore, it is, as a general rule I mean that's. I can't say where we fall as compared to everybody else, but yeah the feature phone as compared to a smartphone is certainly going to be a little more cost sensitive um. We know the use case to it. Am I love that one? I was actually there when we filmed that one where the guy ran it over.

I love it. So you've done the same video for the new one we have. We have a new video. We have a new video that'll be coming out with the launch of the new one. Yes, all right, yeah you'll, like that one.

How high can you drop it from like uh outside the what's really supported? Have you tried like millimeters, or you don't recommend? I haven't tried that I have personally dropped it onto concrete um numerous times you know anywhere from you know, roughly a meter up to well, I did drop it off a ladder. I was up about 10 feet. It did. I did put a nice scratch in the back of my phone, but I mean this is my use daily used phone, and it survived. So you know: can you scratch it yeah? The display is perfect, though it didn't hurt the display.

It didn't harm the audio performance. Nothing happened, there's a little nick right about there. I don't think you can even see it on here. Let's see if I can get the angle right, there's a little there. It is there's a little scratch right there.

We need to video chat in 4k before I can see it, you're right and uh um nice. So um, what's called unbreakable available soon and hopefully a good price. Also, so we'll see all that when it comes out- and one thing I wonder, is this: the sound quality needs to stay good, even when it's submerged when all this stuff uh there's probably some strange considerations and because you need to speak into it, and you need to hear something, so there's like something happening where you can't obviously can't talk underwater um, you know what does occur, and obviously you have the dual front-facing speaker. So this area here there are two speakers in the face of it, along with your earpiece at the top for normal conversation, um and then the microphones that are located in various locations. So if you take it, and you go underwater, you know shaking it out.

You know play some music. There are other apps out there that are called speaker, cleaner type. Apps. All it's doing is just running an audio sweep. The idea is to push the water out, so you know the minute you come out of the device being submerged.

You may see some distortion to the audio because of the water again shake it out, dry, it out, and you're right back to normal nice all right, and it's loud to hear because you want to use it in a construction site yeah, it's its actually rated greater than 106 decibels. So it is very loud well, so it's a loud uh earpiece louder than that. That's the speakers. So, if you're using push-to-talk yeah the speaker, the speakers can achieve greater than 106 dbs of sound pressure across the human audible range. So it's got a very broad range of frequency response and amplitude nice, and I've seen that Qualcomm show some really amazing technology with their microphones.

When you record a video, they can do like shotgun mode kind of thing, because you want to just record in front and not record all the sound around. I wonder if this may be just included. Hopefully no, I know exactly what you're talking about. It's called audio zoom that was not intended in this device. I mean there is an audio focus function, which I mentioned earlier used with push push-to-talk to determine what is the best microphone to use to capture your voice.

It's not the same thing as an audio zoom. Audio zoom is more geared around recording and that's not. You know not something that we were really focused on with this given product, but it is something we are very well aware of nice and 2021. I guess, is going to get twice the bandwidth compared to 2020 in terms of all. This 5g is really getting deployed in a huge way, and the bandwidth is just amazing.

This technology from Qualcomm and all these carriers is going to absolutely people are going to have fun with this bandwidth yeah. Well, the spectrum auctions are still going strong, so we'll see what else they deploy for frequencies, but you've got for Verizon. In particular, you've got their nationwide 5g, as well as the ultra-wideband 5g. So you know, millimeter wave, obviously is in more specific areas for dense population, high capacity and ultra-high speed, so the deployment of that is very specific, but you get a nationwide footprint and there's more spectrum being deployed day by day nice, and then people can use it as a nice little hot spot for their laptop and the whole gear. While they do a bunch of uh other work on other devices, yeah it'll actually support it's a hot spot.

You can connect up to 10 devices, and you've got that 5g back haul. So that's that's. What's really cool is with the 5g back on then connecting all your other devices to it. The user experience is perfect as a hotspot cool thanks a lot so, hopefully the cure. Sarah fans got some uh content more, and they can check your YouTube channel for the updates when you post the video and buy it where they want to buy it all right and in Europe, Europe you're selling in Europe, or no we're not targeting euro.

Our focus really at this point is between Japan and the United States. So right there are um for certain products. There are unlocked variations, so they may be able to be used in different markets, but we don't guarantee that yeah, it's more to see CDMA uh, uh kind of bans right uh. What even the game is. Yeah, CDMA is kind of the legacy stuff.

Obviously, as far as the technology is concerned, so um even that clamshell, the feature phone is a 4g LTE device yeah. So the bands, the bands, though yeah I mean the traditional cellular bands- are certainly supported, but there's many many many depending on where you go. Okay, so just really quick, you know again the dirt force ultra 5g. You know we're focusing on that powerhouse of capabilities. I'm going to jump over a lot of this.

I mentioned a lot of these things for the history Kyocera. This is something of interest, though, is that most homes actually have over 100 Kyocera products in their home, and you may not even know it because we occupy so many spaces of electronic components and ceramic products, kitchen knives. So there 's's Kyocera products in your home um. I mentioned the over 100 devices. I wanted to get to one thing in particular: let's see if I can jump around here, so we do.

This is another thing for that construction environment is, we are certified for use in hazardous locations, so that provides for a level of safety as well as durability, um there's a good example of using it in your pool, um. Here's. What I wanted to show is just this quick little speed test here. This was actually done on the Verizon network in New Jersey and, as I mentioned, I've used it here in San Diego California, and achieved actually slightly higher speeds than this. But it's real.

This device is extremely fast, as you can see it's over one and a half gigabit per second download, and then your upload speeds are exceeding 100 megabits per second on average nice uh. This is uh, we're talking multiple 4k streams. That's right, people can just imagine what they want to do and all these uh, you were saying certified for all these different markets. Uh, there 's's actually probably millions of people working in these uh markets right, uh and in the US. Only in the US is millions of people like oil and all this stuff right.

Absolutely that's again our target. Demographic really is. I mean construction workers, public safety, transportation and logistics. That's one of the things this device also supports is dual-band GPS. So if you get into urban canyons being able to maintain the location accuracy of the device because we're supporting both frequencies, you deal with your reflections off of large buildings and structures.

You can still get the location of the device, so that provides for asset tracking, obviously, as well as worker safety um. That's that's. A big part of our focus is the worker safety, whether you're actually involved in public safety or whether you're just the guy on the road. That's out there taking care of you know, delivering a product to a store. You know getting from point a to point b safely is very important, and I guess the standby time is long, so you might even leave it in some kind of important thing.

As a tracking device kind of uh, something that well along with that, we actually have this device does support, and I'll kind of show. The back again. You'll notice, there are contacts on the back of the phone, those are for charging the device, but we've also developed a vehicle installation kit. So for those people that are, you know, involved in transportation and logistics, you can put this into a kit. It will turn on and off with the ignition of the vehicle, depending on how you want to set it up, but it'll keep it charged and keep it in the vehicle safely locked in.

So you don't have to worry about that, and you can still utilize push-to-talk functionality through that kit. So there's a there's, a lot of things you can do with this aside from just the location tracking and the charging do truck drivers like these phones. Absolutely one of the things we actually find is especially with the feature phone is education, school buses they actually there's an it's been very popular to use as a device to put in a school bus. They can track them as far as location is concerned for safety. It provides for that push-to-talk communication.

So if there is an issue, they have direct communication back to the school. So that's a very popular use case. Nice there's always some delays and stuff like that. That needs to be reported. I'm 15 minutes late, because we had to wait for johnny or something like that.

Exactly that's a good example yeah, as mentioned you know, this is an extremely loud and clear device, so 106 plus db on the front loudspeakers the four mic: noise cancellation and then again a smart amplifier. The smart amplifier really improves the audio performance, but also protects the speakers. So you don't blow out your speakers in the process as well, so it provides for speaker protection, and we talked about the cameras, so you do have a dual led: flash, that's very bright, the time-of-flight sensor, 24 megapixels, main camera and then the 16 megapixel wide angle, and then that eight megapixel front, that's good. That type of flight sensor that you're talking about is a special thing to have in a smartphone it's for it. Yeah, time of flight provides many things, because it's using a form of LIDAR, so you're using ultraviolet light and what this does so.

As a good example, I mean you look here you're if you're looking at something for action, it's the ability to focus very quickly, you're, not looking at the old, traditional PDF or phase detection you're, actually measuring using that light. You're measuring depth um, so it's very fast to focus, and it provides for some enhanced capabilities. So if I wanted to change, let's, let's assume in this picture that there was something in the background and I wanted to change the focal point to that background object. You can do that. It recognizes all the objects within its field, and you can change what is the focal point, but not many phones have this time-of-flight sensor.

Do they uh there's some out there? I mean we're not alone in this. This has been done by others um. It's certainly a higher end feature because it's not iPhones and Samsung's. Now or something isn't it Sam. I know Samsung has done it on certain products, not all um, I'm not sure about apple.

So there was a there was a question earlier in the chat somebody asking about AR um. So I guess this time of flight is also useful for how far can it measure the distance? Is it only nearby or is also far away and um? I don't know the exact range you know I apologize. I don't have that detail um, but it is. It is using ultraviolet light, so you have, you know, a decent field of view and range to it. Um.

I wish I had a better answer for you on that. Okay, I apologize um. You know one of the other things we do, though, with this is also focusing on low light environments. I mentioned that we have the four cell function on the main camera. We also have a software function called super night vision and super night vision.

As you can see the two examples here without super night vision with super night vision, you don't get the washout effect of the light source if it's actually able to capture that light and give you better contrast of the entire image. So you see details that you wouldn't see. A great example is that upper left corner there's a whole other building there, that you don't see without super night vision. Is this the thing where you have to hold it steady for like three seconds for it to take a picture, or it's not that slow, it's fast, faster night mode um, it is fast. Three seconds is probably a little long.

I mean if you give it about. You know. I think our target timing was sub three second um, but yeah you do. There is, and it'll actually show you. It depends on how much light is available, but it'll show you as it's capturing the image and what it's doing is actually capturing multi frames and stitching that information together, nice there's a lot of background processing going on this chipset is AR core certified um.

Now here 's's that example of the action overlay camera. I was talking about where, if you're into biking, you can see your speed, you can see your date and time. You can see the g forces, and then you can even overlay different, there's two-dimensional and three-dimensional maps that you can overlay so that you can see the track of your ride. This is a developed in-house. Yes, this is.

This is a unique Kyocera feature. We've had this on multiple products, and it is a patented item from Kyocera, so for mountain bike for uh, what kind of things a bunch of things yeah a lot of things I mean if you're into you know, motorcycle riding boating. We've had people actually use a mountain, put it on their boat. You know on the windshield of a boat and take it out off scene, just chase dolphins and have some cool videos chase sharks. There you go chase sharks chase the seals.

Whatever you want, um chase the tuna. They need to be overlaid in AR when somebody's found some sharks they can, like everybody, can see and track them and find them uh. No, but not to hurt them, of course, just to look at them right, yeah I mention I mentioned our enterprise grade Wi-Fi and so again that's the ability to hand off between Wi-Fi access points. So as you go through a large warehouse or something like this, we also have 802.11mc, so that provides for round-trip timing for indoor location. So MC, that's not ac, no, not ac it.

It is ac capable as well, but it's MC, and what MC provides for is that round trip timing? So between the access point and the device it can measure the distance and time to give you precise, location, indoor? You know, because you lose visibility to satellite indoor. That's awesome, because until now there was a lot of uh, this kind of like indoor, Bluetooth, positioning kind of stuff, and that means that meant you need to have a lot of trackers everywhere now you can just use the existing, but you have to have a Wi-Fi hotspot that supports MC right or yeah. Yes, no, you do. You do have to have MC support, so they can exchange packets. Um I mean there is.

There is some protocol behind that, but yeah. If you look at a facility like this, where you have Wi-Fi access points, if they update their access points to support the MC protocol, then you can have indoor, you know, location accuracy, that's really I mean within sub two meters is what they claim. So that's it. That's that's quite new, this kind of function. It's its actually been around for a couple of years: um, it's still evolving as far as being deployed, but that is a capability.

You know. Obviously you look at what we've done with GPS and outdoor location accuracy and the realization is. It is again it's about safety, and so, if I've got a big plant like this, I need to know where things are where people are, so I can track assets, but I can track people for safety's sake and if I see that Pete went down to the warehouse to go, get something and he kind of disappeared for the last 20 minutes, and I want to send somebody to go look for him. I can pinpoint that okay and say hey he's he should be over here. Let's go check on him, nice and these warehouses like this amazon, warehouses and stuff that are, as far as I heard, like one of some of the biggest buildings in the world, lots of people in there, and maybe you want to check and find out where people are and stuff.

But I guess they already have some kind of stuff going on, but now they can buy a phone, and they can buy a bunch of MCE. Exactly and again they can use the communication across these access points as well. So even our push-to-talk functionality will work over Wi-Fi, so they can have that push-to-talk communication, as well as the location information in real time throughout their entire facility cool. That's uh! That's a lot of jobs that could benefit from this right, millions, we're talking millions of actual people in their jobs right now, and only in the U. S.

yeah. This device is targeted for the U. S. , and this is our first 5g device coming out. So that capability is really cool.

You know we talked about the hotspot, there's something else: here's more on that asset tracking and location um. There was one over here something I wanted to show. I actually did this on my phone um, so this is the building information modeling. So in the construction industry, working with architects and 3d cad, you can actually look at the three-dimensional drawings of a structure that you're going to be building, and then I can zoom out of it and look at a 2d plot and look at the blueprints and understand. Okay, you know if I need to collaborate, I'm out on the job site- and I see hey, wait a minute we're putting a window in this wall, but there's a brick wall right there that might not work out too well.

So you can actually take advantage of this and do that 3d walk around and look at the blueprints in 2d and collaborate with your co-workers back in the main office to make sure the job is going. The way you need it to go, but can you go back to the previous screen? Was it actually using the time of flight to scan the indoor the building in three? Now? What else is happening there? Those were actual cad drawings? So what I'm doing is accessing a cad. Drawing of you know that the architect, whoever is designing this building, they do their blueprints, and they do their cad design, and I can view that, because of the AR capability of this device, I can view that in a three-dimensional field, I can walk around it. You can turn things upside down. I mean if I wanted to look at the underside of the kitchen sink.

I could literally do that within the application and the device okay. So if I play that again, you kind of look- this is just a drawing. I chose a spot to go, to which I want to look at this virtual bookcase, so I literally zoomed into the room, and then I want to look around okay. I got a table over here. Furthermore, I can look through the floor.

Hey there's another four there's a piano down here, so you can actually kind of look through the whole thing and then take the step back to the two-dimensional world and look at it on paper or virtual paper. So this is something that's special to this phone or every android phone. Does this I'm trying to understand which part of the hardware especially specifically used here, um what is taking advantage of the AR core processing and the graphics capabilities of this chipset? So other devices you can download BIM type applications. How well they perform will vary dramatically. Some may not work at all yeah in this particular case because of the high graphics capabilities of this chipset, we're able to render that information very effectively and as you saw that was very smooth and again I captured that on my own phone, I downloaded a BIM application that allowed me to open up a cad.

You know design file and look at it in real time. Nice all right. It's like a magic box, it's more and more stuff and uh yeah. I mean another thing from a safety and security perspective is we're supporting in this day and age, obviously with masks. We've got construction workers wearing gloves doctors that may wear gloves or masks, so we provided both fingerprint and facial recognition as mechanisms to secure the device.

So you've got a couple different ways to authenticate your use. It does use a FIPS 140-2 cryptographic module, so it is the module itself is a certified module from Qualcomm and then from a design perspective. Again we talked about safety. So much and again, safety is a very important factor of our design. So this device introduces a SOS key that can be utilized with push to talk or mission critical push to talk, as well as potentially other third party applications and again those keys are user programmable.

So if an individual or a company wants to do something special with this, they can assign this key to do. What they want to do with it is. Is that the same key that does the push attack or there's two there's more than one that does uh, there's there are two different keys. There is a push to talk key on the let's say that would be the left side of the phone. You don't see it here because I'm looking on the right side of the valve um and then the SOS key is on the top, so you can show them that right there on your phone, um yeah and they yeah, so you've got the push to talk key on one side of it and then the SOS key is on top again.

The idea of the SOS could also be used as an example as a man down type situation. So there's a lot of possibilities there um the idea would be to capture you know the floor for communication and declare an emergency something else from a safety perspective I want to just cover: is this covert mode? This is something else that we've implemented on this device that you can enable, and when you enable the covert feature in the power menu, you get a new function called covert mode. What this allows for is you know. Law enforcement is a very, very good use case for this, but even a naturalist, somebody that's out observing nature or hunters. You have the ability to from the touch of that covert mode, disable all sound disable all display lighting, so it goes dark and quiet um.

You know the use case for law enforcement obviously, is there's a bad guy out there. Furthermore, you don't want to give up your location, so you can go dark and quiet. Furthermore, you can still enable communication through a headset, so you can talk to your associates as necessary without giving up your location, and then you can still record the video audio. Yes, yes, yep, there are applications that utilize. We work in partnership with others for use of the device as a body camera, and so in that particular case yeah you can have the body camera running, recording video, capturing audio and yet the device itself will not make a sound.

It will not light up. So you can maintain your own personal safety, and they can body cam for a long time, hopefully the whole day or at least a bunch of hours right, yeah. Well, it goes. It goes online. It's not stored locally.

Based on that particular solution there. There are many solutions out there, but the company that we've partnered with for this type of thing the video is stored online in a secured cloud. It's pretty much live-streaming it up there. Basically yeah nice yeah, it's its. You know a secured locker.

You also have this focus mode. This is, is not a unique feature to us, but is a cool feature for maintaining your attention. Um, you don't want distractions. During certain hours of the day, I can set a timer and say: okay between the hours of 10 and 2, I'm not going to get any social media alerts. I'm not going to get you know, I'm only going to get you know specific user alerts from certain applications.

So you can. You know better focus your time, nice yeah, just really quick. The glove and wet touch, that's kind of key to us being rugged and durable. You can use it with gloves. You can use it when it's wet.

So it's tough there's your battery. You were asking about the battery earlier, so 21 hours of talk time, 13 days of standby and again, as I mentioned, it's a durable lithium polymer battery, so it can take a beating too, and then you have three ways to charge it you've got USB is a charging mechanism, you've got chi wireless charging, and then you also have those contacts on the back. Are those contacts like uh preparatory or is like a bunch of accessories that work with that, or you just sell a specific one? We're working with? I mean different. We have different partners, we work with on the accessory side and so you've got a single slot desktop charger. You've got multi-bay chargers.

So if it's an enterprise environment with many devices, they can charge many and then there's that car kit that I mentioned, so the car kit will use those contacts and use that also for ignition sensing to turn the device on and off nice is it for Uber drivers or some fanatic. It could be, it could be um. Certainly, you know we look at it from a transportation perspective um, but yeah Uber driver could use it. No reason they shouldn't. Do you have a lot of police using it um? Well, this device hasn't yet launched, but with the previous model um, it actually has been very popular.

So yeah, one of the big things there from a law enforcement and even transportation, is securing the device. So the car kit provides a secure method of holding the device and allowing you to still access it and use it nice. So there's just kind of the big picture: um again the SOS key, the push-to-talk key, the camera key and yeah. It's the SOS push talking camera. Those three keys are programmable, so, although they have their names in their more or less default function, you can reassign them to whatever you want them to be.

So I guess uh. Maybe a lot of your business goes into when people buy like a bunch with all the employees. That's a very popular use case. Yeah. We, the enterprise environment, there's as an example again there's that multi-slot charger.

So, if they're, using a warehousing environment or manufacturing environment is a good example where they may want to have these devices throughout their workforce and so having systems where, and they may maybe multiply shifts. So it's not any one person's device, the device may transfer across users and so having these types of accessories to be able to I check in the morning I grab a phone out of the charging slot. That's my phone for the day. At the end of my shift, I pop it back in that charging slot. I go home.

The next guy that comes in he's going to grab one that's ready to roll. It would be fun if there was a system that you just fingerprint on any of the let's say: a thousand phones, and it logs you into your whole thing and pretty much instantly. I don't know how, but somehow and then uh cloud kind of thing. I wonder if somebody's doing that, maybe one of the things we one of the things we actually work with is many of the EMM's. We are android enterprise recommended for most of our devices.

This one's in that process, so it will be certified for android enterprise, and with that you have the ability to set up configurations. So at a corporate level they can set up configurations doing individual user profiles is another aspect of that um, so they're already logged into their email, they're logged into, and they can be found like you need to know exactly who's, who right yeah that that piece of it is something that may be able to be worked through an EMM um, not something that I can guarantee at the moment. But not everybody just gets their private one, the personal one right, bring it back home or something yeah. That's the typical! That's the typical use case, all right, yeah, but again the mounting systems, the car kits, the accessories. It's all there and then again we back it all up with a two-year warranty plus we have what we call business select so for a lot of key customers, we'll do advanced replacement.

If they have a failure, they can get a replacement device within 24 hours and we also for large scale. Customers provide for custom configuration, customer repair and life cycle management, so you have a truck driver. Is that the third one or is it an ambulance, driver uh? The third one could be? Do you have people in healthcare like healthcare, absolutely um, we get, we get healthcare? Ems is actually one area that is very used much used by our products because of that push-to-talk functionality yeah it's very popular in the ems because and often ems providers are typically either tied to a fire department, but most often are actually tied to a local hospital, and so you'll get communication between hospital staff and the ems personnel and again because of the durability of our device. It's highly desired in that environment because they're out there in a very unpredictable use. So you know they want to make sure that things going to work wherever they go, and I can imagine in this strange time.

I don't want to say the word of the thing that's happening outside in society right now, but there's a lot to that. What I've heard is that people's phones have more germs and more like they're dirtier than the worst thing you can imagine so yeah, and in this time you might want to have it as a great kind of feature that you can just wash it right. Yeah, that's that is, as we showed earlier, you can wash the device you can take it underwater. You can rinse it off. What we recommend is using 70, isopropyl alcohol and rubbing your device down on a regular basis, just to keep it sanitary.

Is that the same thing people use to uh on the hands that kind of alcohol no yeah yeah. I mean regular rubbing alcohol that you would have in your home the thing that's selling, tons and tons of right now that that alcohol there yeah right, not not the alcohol you're drinking but alcohol using to wash your hands all right so again, uh thanks a lot uh thanks for sharing so much stuff was just uh the that that new product there's so much uh feature packed in there. It's really cool yeah and that's just scratching the tip of the iceberg. You know again what this device is capable of depends on what you needed to do the main again. The main thing is about safety and durability.

So I don't know what prices were your previous generation ones, but let's imagine that this kind of device is at the same price as an iPhone or something. Then it would be a no-brainer right, or do you go a little higher? Usually um again, I don't know the pricing, because you know what they'll do when they launch this. You know the carrier dictates the pricing, and they'll typically do promotions. They'll do trade-ins yeah, so the pricing can be kind of all over the map, depending on what they're trying to do it might be in the contract. Right exactly, I mean a lot of them.

They'll do month by month, they'll have special promotions for different business segments like public safety. So if you're, a police officer or a firefighter um they'll, often do promotions physical therapists, I've seen them as low as 99 cents. So, oh you never know. That's that's something. We don't dictate so the people working in the fire department right they're, like heroes, should we get super discounts correct? I guess maybe that's why they're doing it, it was up to me yeah all right.

So thanks again and uh thanks for doing this online presentation here for the CES 2021, which is actually still going on right, it's the whole month.

Source : Charbax