Kyocera tells you to transfer music files to the SD card by way of the cradle, with included Downloader software. This is a painfully slow process. I had trouble with the USB connection, though this was no fault of the phone's. Using the serial port, it took 64 minutes--that is not a typo--to transfer a single song of 3.9MB to the card. Worse, when a phone call interrupted the transfer, I had to start over.

The USB connection is faster, but not vastly so, because the phone's processor and card-writing hardware cannot keep up with USB data transfer rates. Some people report a maximum rate of about 1MB a minute, which means over two hours to fill a 128MB card. If you plan to add much data--music, photos, or anything else--you will certainly want to buy a small card-writer to attach to your computer's USB port. At a cost of about $50, these devices mount your memory card as a disk drive in Windows. In my test it transferred a 4MB song in 4 seconds and filled the 128MB card in under 2 minutes.

Tip: the music player will find songs only if they are in the card's //Audio folder. For transfer to and from a digital camera, JPEG images need to be in a directory called //DCIM. To put applications or data files where the Palm OS can see them, use the //Palm/Launcher subdirectory.

Firmware may vary somewhat by carrier. My test phone, activated on Verizon, came with multiple browsers--Eudora Web, Blazer, the EIS Browser, and Open Wave's WAP browser.

Included email clients were Eudora and Mobile Mail. Eudora has the virtue of working fine with the flip closed. I like to tell it to check mail, close the phone, return it to the holster, and pull it out again in a minute or two. Other communications tasks, like AvantGo synchronizing, cut short if you close the flip.

The Palm operating system's generic File Manager (see Figure M) is included for basic copy and delete operations between onboard memory and the memory card.

FIGURE M

The included File Manager can copy, move, and delete files.

The File Manager is slow and thin on features. A third-party alternative, such as the freeware Filez (at http://nosleepsoftware.sourceforge.net), is worth adding.

As noted, backup software comes with the Kyocera smartphone. It works exactly as intended. I recently had a mysterious hard reset just as I climbed into a taxi for a lunch date. I restored the Date Book first, in a matter of seconds, to check where I was going. Then I restored the whole Palm OS organizer, which took about 25 minutes.

Also included are PhotoSuite (see Figure N) and a sampling of games, including Tetris.

FIGURE N

The included PhotoSuite can convert and display JPEG, BMP, and AVI media.

There are a great many user-changeable preferences. You can set the Dialer to launch each time the flip is opened (see Figure O), which means the device always opens as a phone and not a Palm OS organizer.

FIGURE O

You can decide what the phone does when you open the flip.

You can also choose to use the flip to answer and hang up from calls. You have a choice of silence or one of many sounds when opening the flip. I fear that way too many people will choose the "Dolphin" sound, which resembles Captain Kirk's communicator. Try to resist.