Virgin Mobile released a decently aggressive plan a few months ago called Beyond Talk: $25 a month for unlimited Internet data and text messaging, 300 voice minutes, and no contract. As most of my calls are going through VOIP these days, this sort of thing is up my alley, so I stopped by a store today to pick up the cheapest of the five phones that are eligible for this deal.

Virgin Mobile advertises the Kyocera Loft as being “Simply Loaded”. After a few hours playing with it, I agree—in much the same way that an infant’s diaper can be described the same way.

Let’s start with the Virgin signup experience. I paid for the first month of service at the point of sale, so I had the Loft’s serial number and a code to add $25 to my Virgin debit account. Tapped the in-phone Activate button to go through the process, but as soon as I asked for a new phone number, the phone told me to go to the website. Which you can’t do from an unactivated phone. So off to the iPod touch and a wireless hotspot.

Signing up on the website was reasonably simple, if I hadn’t been standing outside in front of a Starbucks on a cold night to do it. Chose the plan, declined the insurance, entered the codes, good to go. Until I tried to place a call. Unfortunately, I had only $25 in my account, the recording said, and I had chosen a $25 plan, so I’d have to add an additional zero dollars to my account before I could use the phone. And I was warned that I didn’t have enough money for the insurance I had declined.

Thirty minutes later after a long talk with a nice man with a difficult South Asian accent, I was told to wait four hours and everything would be working. Everything seemed to be working in under five minutes.

Except, of course, the phone.

The Kyocera Loft looks like a Blackberry knockoff—it feels cheap and lightweight, which is fine because it is cheap and lightweight. But the keys are scrunched and easy to miss—I’ve owned my iPod touch for all of ten days, and I’m already much faster at the soft keyboard than I am with this phone. You’ll note from the picture that the phone number keys are normal-sized, so dialing out ain’t easy. And since there’s no way to sync your contacts except to pay for it as a subscription service, you’ll be entering a bunch of numbers.

The real problems start when you try to use the phone’s menu, pictured above. That US silhouette might make you think you’re going to the built-in Google Maps. Instead, it takes you to an advertisement for the $5/month Virgin Mobile navigator service. If you want Google Maps, click on the suitcase, then select Apps, then scroll down to Google Maps.

Which is a shame, because GMaps plus the phone’s GPS is the sole winning feature of this device. But while you’re using it, you can’t really call it a “phone”, as your incoming calls won’t ring the phone while you’re using GMaps. You can receive a call while using the Email app—also written in Java and using the data connection—so I have no idea why GMaps bounces calls.

The Loft also comes with the excellent Opera Mini browser, but that’s not what you get if you click on the globe icon. Instead, you get the insanely craptacular Loft browser. To launch Opera, burrow through the same menus—but unlike GMaps, you can’t go into the settings and assign Opera to its own hardware key for convenience. Mah nishtanah ha-Java hazeh? I have no idea.

In fact, most of the main menu, and a fair portion of the submenus, is just ads for other Virgin services. Click on Wallpapers and you can choose one of several backgrounds for the phone (or buy new graphics, which appears to be the only way to load them), but click on Ringtones and all you get is a sales website. This kind of thing is annoying enough when you can avoid it—it’s infuriating when it’s scattered throughout the phone including the top-level choices.

So this puppy is definitely getting returned within the 30-day refund window. There’s no way to get a refund on the $25 service, so as soon as I burn up the 300 minutes, away it goes. The only remaining question is whether the next JeffTech phone review will be a more powerful phone in the Virgin line, or whether I’m going to start nosing through T-Mobile’s options.

Kyocera Loft
I can’t imagine who would be happy with this phone. Geek users will rapidly be annoyed with what it can’t do, while novice users will be confounded by 12,000 bits of crapware they don’t need. The half-star over truly execrable comes from Google Maps alone; if you don’t care about incoming calls, this was the only part of the experience I truly enjoyed and found useful.

Virgin Mobile
Props to Virgin for aggressive pricing, no contract, and no bullshit. The Loft is a 2G EDGE phone, but email and GMaps with GPS were reasonably quick. (For pedestrian purposes—might be different if you’re driving.) I’m willing to give them another try with a different phone.