I participated in a campaign on behalf of Mom Central Consulting (#MC) for Sprint. I received a product sample to facilitate my review and to thank me for participating.
Recently I was selected as a Sprint Ambassador, which means over the next few I get to play with some really great new phones and accessories! Last month I shared the Sprint HTC One M8 Harman/Kardon edition along with a Harman Kardon Onyx Studio Bluetooth speaker. This month I tried out the Kyocera Hydro Vibe.
What’s the Hydro Vibe? Well it’s an Android phone from Kyocera with a big difference: It is water submersible to 3.5 feet for up to 30 minutes! It also comes with a 4.5-inch impact-resistant screen. That means it’s ready for some pretty serious activity–an more than enough for life’s little slips and spills. By chance this phone came right as we were heading off to our week long family vacation at Big Moose Lake up in the mountains. . . the cell service there was non existent, but I had a big huge lake to try out the water submersibility in:
I have to tell you, my heart skipped a beat when I saw the phone splash into the water. That’s usually a big “oh no!” moment in a cell phone owner’s life. . . but in this case it just kept on working. That’s some peace of mind right there! Now it’s only rated to 3 1/2 feet for 30 minutes, but that means if you were to drop it in the sink while doing dishes, in the tub while washing a squirmy toddler, in the toilet (you know it happens!) or any other number of watery places you wouldn’t have to freak out. If you are into water sports like kayaking or canoeing, you could safely keep the Hydro Vibe zipped in a pocket, and if you were to upset the boat you wouldn’t have to worry that a brief dunking had fried your phone.
The Hydro Vibe is a respectable value phone. It’s got 4G LTE, which is pretty awesome, and it has 2,000 mAh battery that lasts a long time on a single charge It does all the function you could want a phone to do. I will admit that I wasn’t thrilled with the camera. It worked, and was of course about a million times better than the camera on my very first smart phone (isn’t it amazing how far technology has come in such a short time)–but the video was a bit choppy. Then again, I may be a bit picker about photo and video quality than your average user as I use my phone for product photos and videos (like the one above) for work.
There was one more really cool thing about the Hydro Vibe. As I was opening the box initially I noticed a little note on the outside of the box talking about the Sprint Buyback program. It turns out that you can have Sprint buy back your old unwanted cell phones (even from other carriers) and receive some Sprint credit. This keeps old phones out of the landfills and gives customers an incentive to participate. That’s a win-win! And if you don’t want to bother with all that but want to recycle your old phone (and you should–do you have any idea what kind of nasty stuff is in that battery that really really really shouldn’t wind up in the landfill?)–then inside the box of the Kyocera Hydro Vibe there is a FREE mailing envelope to donate your own phone. Can you imagine how much less of that really really really icky stuff would be out there if every phone carrier did the same thing? Kudos Sprint!
#SprintMom #Sponsored #MC
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