Received the new/old Kyocera 6035 pda/phone and activated with Verizon easily (just a non-cell phone call), and played with it a bit over the past week. Good and bad points to this phone.

  • This fat/wide phone fits in a shirt pocket, but takes up a lot of room.
  • The little stick used to make selections on the small screen is a little imprecise (read: lots of mistakes and retries).
  • The black-on-gray screen is pretty hard to read in anything less than full sunlight. If dark enough the backlight is passable.
  • Rogue doesn’t work properly :)
  • Did (eventually) get the built-in modem to work, which is kind’a cool.

Installed AOL on my laptop, partly to test the modem function of the cell phone, and partly out of curiousity. I had an AOL account I used occasionally (it was useful at odd times for a reason I cannot recall) up until about 10 years ago.

Funny thing is - AOL is painfully slow over a cell phone (nominal) 14.4Kb modem! Maybe I had just forgotten how slow dialup connections really are…