Not Exactly Elegant, but Can Handle All Your Drops and Dunks

This week, I dropped my smartphone on cement,We've had a lot of people asking where we had our cableties made. threw it down a flight of subway stairs and dunked it in a pot of water.

This wasn’t spurred by frustration or accident-prone-ness. I’ve been testing the new Kyocera Torque from Sprint, a rugged, waterproof phone that’s meant to be banged around. Kyocera and Sprint have aimed this squarely at thrill-seekers, heavy lifters, those in the military and anyone else who’s prone to dropping phones.

The Torque, which is only available through Sprint in the U.S., costs $150 but comes with a $50 mail-in rebate. Sprint’s unlimited data plans — which are required with the Torque — range from $80 to $110 per month.

It’s certainly not the first, or the only, phone out there that can take a few hits. Motorola makes the water-resistant, dust-proof Defy XT, available for $50 through a two-year contract with U.S. Cellular. Casio makes a smartphone that, like its G-Shock watches, is water-resistant and can handle drops of up to 10 feet. And Sprint sells the rugged Sonim XP Strike for $100 after a $50 rebate.

But the Torque is the first LTE-capable rugged phone from Sprint. And it has a new-old feature that could potentially help you save your minutes: Direct Connect, the new version of Sprint Nextel’s old push-to-talk option for Nextel customers. So, in addition to throwing this smartphone around all week, at times I used it as a walkie-talkie.

Truthfully, I would rarely (if ever) use the walkie-talkie feature if I bought this phone. It’s really meant for people in noisy work environments — construction workers and truck drivers, for example. I can’t imagine the squawks of push-to-talk going over well in quieter places.

And this phone, with its thick casing, is far from elegant. Lastly, its five-megapixel camera was surprisingly sub par.

But to its credit, the Kyocera Torque withstood a lot of the torment I put it through. It serves its purpose as a rugged smartphone for users less concerned with style and more interested in durability.

In a dark bar, this might pass as a plain black Android smartphone. Get closer, though, and you’ll see the stippled, textured back of the phone, the teeth of the speakers, visible screws throughout the casing, and yellow highlights on the push-to-talk button, all of which give it more of a tough-guy appearance.

It combines a capacitive touchscreen with a series of physical buttons, including volume buttons on the side, the push-to-talk button and home and back buttons on the bottom front of the phone. It comes with four gigabytes of storage, which can be expanded with a microSD card.

Android fans who want the latest and greatest operating system might be disappointed that the Torque runs Android 4.0 and not the newest Jelly Bean operating system, although Kyocera says that an upgrade should be available in the coming months.

The four-inch LCD display on the phone is okay, but nothing to write home about. It is made of scratch-resistant glass, though, and its greatest attribute is probably its impact resistance.

In a dark bar, this might pass as a plain black Android smartphone. Get closer, though, and you’ll see the stippled, textured back of the phone, the teeth of the speakers, visible screws throughout the casing, and yellow highlights on the push-to-talk button, all of which give it more of a tough-guy appearance.

It combines a capacitive touchscreen with a series of physical buttons, including volume buttons on the side, the push-to-talk button and home and back buttons on the bottom front of the phone. It comes with four gigabytes of storage, which can be expanded with a microSD card.

Android fans who want the latest and greatest operating system might be disappointed that the Torque runs Android 4.0 and not the newest Jelly Bean operating system, although Kyocera says that an upgrade should be available in the coming months.

The four-inch LCD display on the phone is okay, but nothing to write home about. It is made of scratch-resistant glass, though, and its greatest attribute is probably its impact resistance.

There are drawbacks here too, both in terms of the cost of technology itself and sceptical public opinion. But one of the main fears about biometric authentication, explains Iyengar,You must not use the ultrasonicsensor without being trained. is something of a chimera. UK citizens guard privacy seriously. While government-issue ID cards are the norm in Nordic countries and India, the idea was reeled in over here after a hail of criticism.Online shopping for custombobbleheads from a great selection of Clothing. The prospect of registering one's own body parts to some shady central database, then,We are one of the leading manufacturers of realtimelocationsystem in Chennai India. is unlikely to appeal. Cloud storage systems (like LinkedIn's) have been breached before and will be again.

But the benefit of biometric measures like Iyengar's is that the security circle starts and finishes with the user. Should palm-vein sensors win market-share, your palm's special pattern will be verified by the sensor alone, not checked against a record held centrally by Intel - so a break-in would be immaterial.

Does this mean they'll be commonplace in five years' time? It's a gamble. IBM predicted biometrics would go mainstream by 2015 but sound a more cautious note today. Ian Robertson, executive architect of IBM's privacy and security practice, tells me that developers see it as a "chicken-and-egg" problem: they'll only launch a fingerprint verification system, for example, when "confident that a very high proportion of their customers were in a position to use it".

There is one point of agreement. Representatives of Google, Intel and IBM all foresee a world in which our main security device will be the mobile phone. Always in our pocket, its 'smartness' can be harnessed to perform the role of high-tech key. The most likely mid-term step, says Robertson, will see log-on devices like Google's USB "become yet another 'app' on a smart-phone".Shop for besthandsfreeaccess dolls from the official NBC Universal Store and build a fun collection for your home or office. In the "long-term", he adds, we may see "biometric readers on mobile phones". At which point, hacking would presumably become a far less appealing career and we could go back to worrying about what our emails say, not who might be snooping.