Long-term Review: Kyocera Brigadier - The Best Android Phone of the Year? By JuanBagnell

Hey everybody some gadget guy here, and today we are wrapping up our long-term review on the Kyocera Brigadier and if you got the title of this video I'm, not joking, this is shaping up to be one of my favorite Android phones of the year before we get to into the review. I really want you guys, thinking about what makes a phone high-tech and when we start getting really antsy about things like price and Worth and value what makes a phone a solid purchase now the brigadiers internals aren't really going to WoW anyone in this day and age of super high-end, flagship phones with HD displays. We've got a 4.5 inch, 720p display powered by a Qualcomm 400 series, quad-core: we've got nice click Hardware buttons down at the bottom and dual stereo speakers. We already have a speaker review that you can listen to on the Brigadier, it's nice and loud as you can see, there is no top earpiece speaker, and we'll definitely be covering that a little later in the review and the entire front face of the display is built out of sapphire crystal instead of glass, no Gorilla Glass here this is sapphire and not like s. AFF Atari trademark know the actual gemstone sapphire, which the only thing harder than is diamond, and we already have a torture test on this screen. It broke my heart to treat any phone as roughly as I have the Kyocera brigadier, but I have not been kind to this phone, and it's risen to every challenge that I've faced it with now.

The Brigadier is definitely a junkie, but that comes with the benefit of providing a 3100 William hour battery, which, if you high per mile this phone, you can easily get two day runtime out of for a quick size, comparison with a couple other phones out there. It's definitely bigger than my last rugged phone favorite, the Samsung rugby pro. This is a 4-inch screen versus the Kyocera is 4.5-inch screen and because of the head and chin on the Kyocera. Its dimensions come in a little larger than the Lucia 1020 in Lucia 925, which also have 4.5 inch.720P displays for this class of devices you're really not going to find a larger phone until you climb up to a significantly larger screen size to the 5-inch screen on the Lucia icon, for example, in terms of general performance, Kyocera, is doing a fairly terrific job of taking advantage of the horsepower that the Qualcomm 400 has to offer I've found that performances on par, if not slightly happier than the LG g3 vigor, which I recently reviewed paging through home screens. Dropping your notification tray firing up your app drawer and sliding, through the different apps that you've got installed, everything's going to function for the basics, about where you think it should, where Google and Qualcomm are going with Android.

This new mid-range is more than capable of providing a fluid sleek fast experience for checking your email, keeping up with your social networks, sharing photos, uploading, small pieces of media continuing our hardware tour. The top panel has a power button, a speakerphone button, so you can automatically toggle speakerphone while you're in the middle of a call and a covered headphone jack. This doesn't quite have the same sophistication as the Galaxy s5 active, which has a waterproofed headphone jack. You do need to keep this port cover closed. If you're going to maintain waterproofing ditto the bottom panel, which has the covered micro, USB port and a microphone on the right side of the device, we've got the micro SD card, the SIM card slot and a dedicated camera button.

How excited am I to see a dedicated camera button on an Android phone CROPS Kyocera, that's rad, and on the left side of the device we've got the volume rocker and a customizable hardware key that you can use for just about any function or to launch any app on the phone. This does have a built-in lanyard strap, which, depending on how active you are I, might actually recommend you throw the lanyard on there just so that you don't lose your phone while you're out doing all of your super cool high adventure activities and on the back of the devices where we'll find the eight megapixel shooter capable of 1080p video and the LED flash we've already produced a camera review on the Kyocera brigadier, so you can definitely check out what the video quality is like off of this rugged little beast, and this is maybe where we should start our discussion on my experiences using the Kyocera brigadier. This back panel has all of these little cutouts and edges and differing materials and everything about this phone from the hardware bill to some of the software customizations we're going to look at in just a bit of screams tough. This is a tough phone. It can do tough things for tough people if your lifestyle involves tough stuff.

This phone's going to hang with you. This is one of the few areas where I can knock that tough aesthetic I really wish that they had built the entire out of this rubbery soft drippy plastic here that we find on the sides, as opposed to this smoother glassy ER plastic, that they use throughout most of the backplate, as you can see through all the different torture tests and every time I take this phone out in public I. Pretty much show another person how unbelievably durable the screen is, but it's only taken a couple: sharp rocks to completely scratch up this backplate. Now, as you can see where these scratches travel across the backplate, they don't seem to affect the rubbery plastic grips on the sides when using a phone like this, you kind of start developing a chick, dig scars kind of mentality for how you throw it around you. You just stop worrying about how rough you might be handling your phone.

It's actually kind of a culture shock to go back to a flagship phone where you have to treat it a lot nicer, but in terms of how this phone will age, I really wish this plastic weren't quite so scratch prone, especially compared to how amazingly durable the screen is, and we run into that same problem here on the sides of the device. The smoother plastic is gouged up like crazy, and it shows it's very clear and easy to see how rough this plastic has become. It's a little more difficult to see how chewed up the rubbery plastic is here down below this build of Android is relatively unmolested. We go into settings, and they do use a lighter background for settings with colors for each of the individual categories and that's going to be a personal preference, whether you like that I'm still a big fan of the hold UI from Android 4, where all of this is sort of black, with more neon light colors, where we really get into Chaos areas. Customizations are on things like their widgets.

For your home screen. Remember how I said everything is supposed to be tough? Well, every single widget that they've included has some kind of brushed aluminum trim in the software, which makes it look like it's rugged and metallic and ready to do battle and all of their widgets have aura built into them, because it's durable, even the widgets, are durable for tough people who are durable people and rugged people. This is the aura clock with weather, and this is your aura compass and your aura shortcuts and your aura whether it's a very nice consistent touch throughout all the UI, but it does become a little silly after a point where even the software has to scream tough for tough people Plus. This mother-father even has wireless charging built on the QI standard I'm using an old Nokia charger from my Lucia 920, and you can see OOP just turned on it's charging via this old Nokia backplate. If you have a Fat Boy, if you've got any of these QI chargers, you don't even need to pop the bottom port on your Kyocera.

You can just pop it on one of these pads, and it's going to start charging right up. Someone please correct me down in the comments, because I couldn't think of one but I, don't think there are any Android mid-Ranger's that have QI charging built in I'm, just so stoked to see an Android phone at a four hundred dollar price point. Supporting this kind of feature and also really happy to see the Verizon is sided with QI. Unlike 18t moving over to PMA, you guys know: I'm, not a huge fan of top mounted power buttons because of the way that you've got to dance them around. In your hand, to reach this top even on a smaller screen.

It can sometimes be a bit of a juggle just to get in there and hit that power button, and that's why I'm a much bigger fan of throwing power buttons on the sides of devices, but the sides on this phone are already pretty well-packed. So other companies like Samsung, have gotten around that by having activation from the home button down here at the bottom, but hitting that home button doesn't seem to do anything. The only other quirk that we might run into is with the programmable button. Here on the side now, I've left it stock, which means a long press on this programmable button. Will fire up the flashlight app, but if you employ any kind of security like I use a pattern unlock, it halts the activation of the long press there if I come in, and I long press, it'll fire up the screen, and then I have to unlock the phone, and then it'll fire up the flashlight app, and you can see the flashlight is on now behind the phone.

We can turn the flashlight off and then go home again. If you long press on the camera button, even with security enabled it will bypass security, allowing you to take a picture. But then you just can't get into anything else on the phone until you go and unlock the screen, it would be nice if the flashlight and the programmable button functioned in the same way and speaking of the camera app, it's actually a pretty ambitious affair. Considering Kyocera is not really known for their imaging or multimedia creation. Like a lot of cameras, we now have one live view screen, which you can easily jump between photos and videos directly from this interface.

You don't have to go into camera mode or into video mode, but pulling up the settings. You can see a number of customizable features from why balance two scene modes. If you want to mess with colors continuous shooting panorama, you can have a Smile Shutter HDR, and they have a DSLR style. D focus setting just very much like a lot of the other camera apps we've seen we're sort of scan the background and helps you blur the background in your shots. Plus you can get into more advanced control over brightness settings and contrast settings how your autofocus system works, whether you're employing spot metering, and we also have a software image stabilization feature, but I would also highly recommend checking out my video review on the camera.

As the under powered guts, the Qualcomm 400 series processor does run into some issues utilizing some of these features like image stabilization, while shooting video it struggles with 1080p 30 frames per second video, while also employing any kind of software alteration to that video. But while that video performance suffers a little, the stills' performance is actually pretty solid and, with a little patience in a little practice, you can nail some gorgeous shots. It's certainly not as easy to use as other phones that we've played with in this price range, but it's not a completely hamstrung affair, not entirely sure how Kyocera managed to do this, but they've found a way to make the screen a lot more responsive when water is on the display than any of the previous rugged or waterproof phones that I've used in the past and just kind of tap. All these phones off a little keep a little water on the screen, but so that they're not soaked, and we try and do something on the galaxy it gets hung up. It gets really stutter.

Actually, then, I can't get the notification tray back up, though, up there we go and kind of go through the rugby, and it works, but it gets sort of stuck. It gets a's a little harder to get through Jeep, it's a little harder to get through various home screens with any water on the screen we come over here to the Kyocera, and while it's not perfect, it does seem to be a lot more responsive than any of these other rugged phones that I've used previously. So you can't use the any capacitive screen when it's totally soaked. You obviously wouldn't be able to use the Kyocera if it were underwater, but happily it doesn't need to be perfectly dry just to get around various elements of the UI they've done a phenomenal job of incorporating a waterproof screen into this phone. You guys have followed me on other videos and other podcasts.

Furthermore, you know that I'm getting a little cranky about all phones, basically just being one slab of glass over five inches in size, they're all sort of competing for the same high-end, specs and I. Don't think all phone manufacturers are doing a great job of targeting specific demographics with their devices they're all trying to make these all-rounder one size fits all solutions and outside a company like Samsung, who is willing to experiment with a phone like the rugby pro or the Galaxy s4 and s5 active phones. Kyocera is really the only phone manufacturer who's making it their dedicated mission to provide rugged and waterproof phones for consumers. For people who care about survivability over the life of a two-year contract. Kyocera is a company that you should be paying more and more attention to remember how lit up everyone was going to be about the iPhone 6 having a sapphire display.

I thought it was a little suspect that after the iPhone 6 launched- and it didn't have the sapphire crystal display. All of a sudden. We saw a bunch of editorials and tech blog write-ups about why you don't need sapphire display. It's really not that good, and you know it doesn't really provide benefits, and you can still break sapphire display. So it's not instructable blah blah blah blah blah, starting with the video torture test that I did on the brigadier.

This phone has survived so much more intentional damage than any other phone. That I have tried to intentionally break rubbing it through rocks and dirt, and sediment and concrete, and resulting with the screen, which is still almost factory-fresh I, have actually managed to lightly scratch. This screen. There is no way for me to show you that on camera, the scratches are so faint that I can only detect them in direct sunlight and I tried, with several cameras and lenses to properly expose for the screen in direct sunlight. So you could see those scratches, and I was unable to show them off.

Months of abuse and I have not been kind to this Kyocera, but my excitement over this phone extends beyond just the sapphire crystal remember how I said there is no top earpiece here on this phone, the entire screen assembly. This entire display is a vibrating membrane. So, as you hold this phone up to the side of your face, it is creating its own sound, but it is all so vibrating the soft tissue in your skull to provide a direct audio line into your inner ear, which means you have a much easier time listening to phone calls in challenging environment. If you need to you can take a phone call with earplugs in that is ridiculous, plus I can't say just how happy I am to see another phone manufacturer figure out front-facing speakers. This isn't really the most ideal position for front-facing speakers for multimedia junkies, but when you flick over into speakerphone, this thing gets even louder and the phone continues to point the audio in the right direction, namely right into your face, no more cupping a hand behind or pointing the rear bottom of the phone towards your ear when you're taking a speakerphone call, but the durable screen the tissue conduction audio in the display, and these front-facing speakers are premier lifestyle features.

This is bleeding edge technology right here, leading edge technology for actually using your phone as a communications device, even if some other internal specs don't make it the best content, creation or multimedia device. To put that in comparison, it's only about 60 dollars more expensive than a phone like the LG g3 vigor similar screen. Only now we have sapphire glass Weiss. The amount of ram is the vigor twice the amount of on-board storage, 16 gigabytes versus 8 gigabytes on the vigor and in sanely, durable housing. That's also why P 68 water resistant and mil spec 810g drop-in shock resistant, and it just boggles the mind that if Kyocera of all companies was able to put out a $400 phone with a sapphire display and find a way to make that profitable, why couldn't a palazzo company develop something similar for the iPhone 6? Just on all points, the few criticisms that I can level at the Kyocera brigadier are handily eclipsed by all the amazing bleeding edge durability and communications features built into this handset.

In my not so humble opinion, the brigadier is the best mid-range err on the market. Today, maybe one of the few mid-range errs that I think is absolutely worth the asking price, and that's no small feat in a market of amazing entry-level phones and flagship phones which drop in price really quickly. Well, I, don't do scores or grades or rankings, because I think that information becomes obsolete. The second you publish it. The brigadier is easily one of my favorite smartphones of the year and, of course, I want to hear from you folks.

What is it that you're excited about when you're shopping, a new smartphone do durable and rugged phones catch your eye, and how do you balance some of that work in play aspect when you need to take your phones out on hikes or other challenging environments? Definitely got me some comments down below, because I love getting into conversations like that. As always, folks, thanks so much for watching my videos, subscribing to my channel sharing my videos, you have been talking up a storm recently on social media and social networks, and I cannot thank you enough, because you're bringing all kinds of new people to this YouTube channel and helping me share all of this tech. Goodness with you, fine folks hit that thumbs up button and I will catch you all on the next review.

Source : JuanBagnell