Bad design with a goodness for deaf people. Not bad enough.

When I look this handset for the first time, surely, I don’t know yet what was in the mind of those Kyocera’s engineers and designers when they launched this CDMA handset.

Just look at it. This is somewhat not a cell phone for todays generation right? Anyway, I still respect you if you have any other ideas. One thing for sure, blogger called Jayvee from Cellphone 9 was felt so (extremely) disturbed by this stuff.

Let’s see what he/she said:

Well, there really isn’t anything worth mentioning about this phone. This is a CDMA phone that doesn’t have a camera nor have MP3 playback features. At the very least it’s got an alarm and vibration alert. The cheapest phone to date I’ve seen costs roughly $20.00 and if Kyocera can’t sell at a lower price point, well either they got really misinformed customers or God is on their side.

Wow, calm down dude, Kyocera is likely gonna be mad about this. Now, unlike Jayvee, here I think that this handset still has a unique feature to be revealed too. That is a “Hearing Aid Compatibility (HAC)“.

HAC is such a standard in which cell phones will be judge on issue related with hearing aids. This standard or rule is happened since when used together, some mobile phones and hearing devices (hearing aids and cochlear implants) result in buzzing, humming or whining noises detected by the user. Some hearing devices are more immune than others to this interference noise, and phones also vary in the amount of interference they generate.

The wireless telephone industry has developed two types of ratings for mobile phones to assist hearing device users in finding phones that may be compatible with their hearing devices.

M-Ratings

Phones rated M3 or M4 meet FCC requirements and are likely to generate less interference to hearing devices than phones that are not labeled. M4 is the better/higher of the two ratings. The M stand for Microphone.

T-Ratings

Phones rated T3 or T4 meet FCC requirements and are likely to be more usable with a hearing device’s telecoil. The T stand for Telecoil.

Thanks for Kyocera Wireless for this explanation.

Back to S1000, as a M3 / T4 Rating, we can considered this handset as a nice gadget for they who are found themself to be deaf and (sorry) comes from low-middle class. I’m not kidding here and Kyocera isn’t too. The deaf people which comes from high class have a chance to purchase other series like Tempo E2000 or Wild Card.

Other feature which I considered to be cool is the TTY/TDD capable. What’s this? This is short for Telephone Typewriter/Telecommunications Device for the Deaf. Within this, S1000 will has a capability to make its deaf or mute users become easier to talk over telephone lines. If you want to know the goodness of this feature, you may open a page from Tech-Faq here (a complete and comprehensive one).

Here is the (ordinary) specs of Kyocera S1000:

1. 96 X 64 pixel black and white display with color filter
2. Built-in MIDI ringtones, screen savers and games
3. SMS/EMS capabilities*
4. Contact directory
5. Alarm, calculator, scheduler, stopwatch, timer, tip calculator and world clock
6. Vibrate alert
7. Supports multiple languages (English and Spanish)
8. TTY/TDD for the hearing impaired*
9. Hearing Aid Compatibility: M3 rating
10. CDMA2000® 1X and AGPS/ E-911 capable*
11. More on Kyocera S1000 brochure (PDF).

Note: * means Depending on services available from your service provider.

The accessories

Battery, Travel Charger, and Car Adapter

Conclusion:

Kyocera’s S1000 is not an extremely bad one. It’s just lack of good design.

Source: Cellphone9, Kyocera, and Tech-Faq

Image courtesy of Cellphone9 and Kyocera

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 Print Posted by Wim Permana on April 25th, 2008