Brawn isn’t everything. The Kyocera DuraForce Ultra 5G for Verizon ($899.99) is the carrier’s latest super-rugged smartphone, and it lives up to its promise of being a tough companion for tough jobs. It falls short in many other areas, though, including camera, networking, and battery. Especially for the price, this is a DuraForce generation to skip.
Built to Take a Beating
Kyocera’s DuraForce phones have built-in, ruggedized cases. This model measures 6.5 by 2.95 by 0.63 inches (HWD) and weighs 9.81 ounces, most of which goes into the massive plastic-and-rubber bumpers around the phone. The case is thoughtfully designed with frequent drops in mind. A lip around the front protects the screen when it lands face down, and the camera glass on the back is slightly recessed, so the main body takes any shock when it lands on its back.
Drop tests proved this design’s worth. Dropping the phone several times from waist height onto rough concrete caused some nicks and scratches on the surround, but the case protected the phone. The screen uses Kyocera’s Sapphire Shield glass, which other reviewers have found is resistant to scratch tests. We don’t scratch-test screens, but the display on our test unit didn’t scratch or crack after several drops to concrete and several weeks of normal use.
The abundant configurable physical buttons are easy to use while you’re wearing gloves. Along with the power button, which also houses a fingerprint sensor, you’ll find physical buttons for camera, push-to-talk, SOS, and volume controls. You can assign any app to the camera, SOS, and PTT buttons. You’ll also probably be happy to see a real 3.5mm headphone jack and an easily accessible microSD card slot. Because the phone is so protectively sealed, though, there is no access to the battery.
Basic voice calling is an absolute strength here. My decibel meter showed the DuraForce Ultra as slightly louder than a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. The earpiece read at 94.5dB (compared with the S21 Ultra’s 93.8dB); the speakerphone, at six inches, was 98.9dB (versus 98.3dB). On a busy street, the Kyocera’s speakerphone triumphed over basic street noise but struggled when a forklift was loading a truck in my immediate vicinity.
Battery Concerns Undermine Performance
The DuraForce Ultra has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G processor. It performs adequately. PCMark Work performance and Geekbench 5 performance were on par with midrange phones such as the LG Velvet and OnePlus Nord N10, though the DuraForce Ultra did a bit better on the GFXBench Car Chase graphics benchmark than those phones did. The other 765G phones cost $400 to $500, though, and the DuraForce Ultra costs $900; that gap is tough to swallow.
What do you lose here by Kyocera choosing the Snapdragon 765G and not an 800-series processor? Benchmarks and easily noticeable application performance won’t tell you, but in daily use, you’ll miss camera Night mode, some networking features, and other features I’ll get to below.
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The DuraForce Ultra runs Android 10 in the era of Android 11. In mid-April 2021, our testing device had only received the December 2020 security update. (My Galaxy S21 and Galaxy Note 20 Ultra are both on the April 2021 patch.) I’ve heard no promises about updates.
There’s a quirky collection of built-in software, inclduing a half-dozen preloaded Verizon apps (undeletable, but disable-able), a compass, and a barometer (which consistently gave me very wrong altitude measurements). Of the built-in 128GB, about 106GB is available.
For a phone designed to be taken off the grid, the DuraForce Ultra has a disappointing battery. In our standard battery test, which streams a video at maximum brightness over Wi-Fi, it only lasted for 7 hours, 40 minutes. That’s not great, and it only tells half the story.
Throughout my weeks with the DuraForce Ultra, I’d regularly pick up the phone after leaving it off its charger for a day or two to find that it was completely tapped out. Given that Kyocera claims the phone can go 13 days between charges, that was pretty surprising. Looking at the battery usage graph, we found that the Verizon PTT+ push-to-talk app was using a massive amount of battery, even in Standby mode.
Fortunately, the app can be uninstalled (and the PTT button can be reassigned to any app you like), but we shouldn’t need to say that about a flagship feature. Killing PTT+ didn’t have much effect on the screen-on battery test; that only increased to 8 hours. But the daily use experience improved dramatically.
The included 27w charger charged the battery to 15% in 10 minutes and 47% in half an hour, but charging slowed down significantly after about an hour (82%), and it took 110 minutes to get to 100%. There are two contacts on the back of the phone so it can slot into enterprise cradles that charge many phones at a time.
Tolerable Connectivity, But It Doesn’t Like to Share
For a Verizon 5G phone, the DuraForce Ultra has a relatively basic networking layout. It supports Verizon’s LTE, 5G DSS, and 5G millimeter-wave bands, but not LTE band 46 (LAA) or, more importantly, C-band. Verizon intends to launch C-band for 100 million people in 46 major metro areas by next March. C-band isn’t really relevant if you intend to use this out in the woods, but if you’re thinking of your rugged phone as an in-city hotspot, it’s important.
Basic connectivity is fine, but don’t expect to see the peak LTE speeds you’ll get on flagship phones. When grabbing a weak signal in a weak LTE area, it performs on par with the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. But its performance ceilings are much lower. According to Kyocera, LTE speeds are down at Category 11 (600Mbps); more recent flagships go to 1Gbps or beyond. Millimeter-wave speeds got up to 2Gbps in my real-world tests, on par with the Note 20 Ultra, but range was notably shorter—about 650 feet from a panel rather than 800 feet.
Most importantly, the Wi-Fi Hotspot mode is a disaster. The phone can only generate a 2.4GHz hotspot, which in my testing was limiting speeds on connected devices to around 50Mbps even when the phone itself was getting a 1Gbps millimeter-wave connection. To properly share a 5G connection, you need a 5GHz hotspot mode, which most other higher-end phones have.
Wi-Fi reception, using a 5GHz 802.11ac network, was just fine; the problem is with transmitting a hotspot. The phone also supports Bluetooth 5 for headsets.
This all comes down to how and where you intend to use this phone. If you’re using it for adventure sports or to be a park ranger, fine. But if you want it to be a 5G hub for multiple devices in your urban ambulance or at your construction site, its networking capabilities fall short.
Gimmicky Cameras With Basic Problems
The DuraForce Ultra has three cameras: a 24MP main camera; an additional 16MP, 117-degree wide-angle lens on the back; and an 8MP camera on the front. The main camera records 4K video. They all have cool tricks, buttons, and modes, but ultimately they don’t take very good images.
I’ve never seen anything like Kyocera’s Action video mode, which is designed to be used when the phone is mounted to bike handlebars or such. It superimposes a layer of cool metrics, such as speed, G-force, and a map, over your 1080p video. The downside is that video is only mildly stabilized, so you’ll want to have the phone in a bracket that gives it some stability.
Underwater photography is a neat trick. In Underwater mode, software disables the touch screen so the water doesn’t create accidental touches, and you can manipulate menus and take shots with the hardware camera buttons on the side.
Compared with a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, though, the DuraForce Ultra’s cameras fail on image quality. Nighttime test shots were universally darker on the DuraForce Ultra than on the Galaxy S21 Ultra, showing much more artifacting. Colors in daytime images were blown out, with details less distinct.
The DuraForce Ultra’s wide-angle camera creates a lot of distortion at the edges of the frame, far worse than on the Galaxy S21 Ultra; it also has an odd minor bug where photos get saved rotated 90 degrees.
What You Give Up for the Sake of Ruggedness
The DuraForce Ultra has more power than Verizon’s other rugged smartphones, the Sonim XP8 and Duraforce Pro 2. It has a faster processor, better cameras, and 5G. But at $899, this phone also costs double what those models do right now.
At least some of that additional price is down to the 5G, and the 5G return on investment for this phone isn’t there. It can’t share out millimeter wave as a fast hotspot, and it won’t work with Verizon’s C-band network next year.
We skipped reviewing the Duraforce Pro 2, but on paper it looks like a better buy right now, with a Snapdragon 630 processor and solid 4G in a very similar body for $444, not $899. You can spend some of those savings on an Inseego MiFi M2100 hotspot for your work site. Until Kyocera builds a rugged phone that makes better use of Verizon’s current and future 5G networks, there’s just no reason to drop flagship cash on this one.
