Kyocera DuraXE Epic

Kyocera comes through for AT&T with the DuraXE Epic ($269.99), a rock-solid voice phone that will be a reliable companion. The DuraXE Epic has all of Kyocera's traditional strengths, most notably a nigh-indestructible body and very clear voice quality. Though it's expensive, it sets the bar for voice performance on AT&T and is our Editors' Choice.

Built to Be Beaten

The DuraXE Epic is mostly made of smooth black plastic, with rubber bumpers on the corners. It measures 4.36 by 2.22 by 1.07 inches (HWD) and weighs 6.8 oz. It's very similar in size to the Sonim XP3 or to Kyocera's phones for Verizon; the Sonim phone is a duller black, though.

Durability is Kyocera's selling point, as always: The phone is waterproof (rated IP68) and designed to survive drops of five feet onto concrete. The back is removable, but it screws closed rather than snapping closed for extra durability. The rest of the body is festooned with buttons. There's an SOS button on one side, a Push to Talk button on the other, and speakerphone and End Call keys on the top of the phone. The SOS and PTT buttons can be set to open any app, so you could use one as a camera key, for instance.

The bottom part of the case has large bumpers that catch most of the shock when you drop the phone. I'm happy to say a half-dozen drops from five feet onto textured stone just resulted in some minor cosmetic damage to the bumpers. Between the flip form and the big plastic body, nothing really scratched or broke during my testing period.

There's a bright 1.08-inch, 102-by-90-pixel monochrome screen on the outside for status and caller ID information. Inside, there's a 2.6-inch, 320-by-240-pixel LCD. The keypad is made of smooth, clicky buttons separated by plastic ridges, with dedicated buttons for starting and ending calls, switching to speakerphone, and activating the extremely basic voice command system.

A number of the phone's enterprise-centric features are aimed at AT&T's FirstNet subscribers, who use a dedicated network for public safety and first responders. For instance, the headset jack accepts special push-to-talk headsets that lock into the phone, and there are charging contacts for mass chargers that hold many phones at once.

Speed and Clarity

This is a 4G phone, and that's just fine. AT&T's current 5G network doesn't bring much to the table for a phone like this. There's support for bands 2/5/12/14/66, a very AT&T-focused set; the DuraXe Epic will get ideal AT&T coverage but is likely to drop to 3G if you try to bring it abroad.

Inside the DuraXE Epic is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 215 processor where the Sonim XP3, its primary competitor, uses the older 210. Qualcomm says the 215 has snappier performance, faster downloads with carrier aggregation, better voice quality, and better camera quality, and our testing of the DuraXE Epic bears that out.

The DuraXE Epic feels distinctly faster than the XP3 and many other voice phones, such as the Nuu F4l and Nokia 6300 (but not the Sunbeam F1, which also uses a faster processor). According to Qualcomm, the 215 is 50% faster than the 210; we can't run benchmarks on these phones, but the speed boost shows in every day use.

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Like with other voice phones, the hotspot uses a Category 4 LTE modem, with speeds much lower than you'd get on a premium smartphone. In our tests, download speeds came to 33.8Mbps, much better than 24.5Mbps on the Sonim. A Samsung Galaxy S20 in the same spot pulled down 129Mbps because of its more advanced modem. Wi-Fi calling is not supported.

All phones with 4G calling have HD Voice. Here, voice quality has been further enhanced by the EVS voice codec, also known as ultra-HD voice calling. EVS only kicks in when you're calling another EVS phone—which mostly means higher-end smartphones—but when it's on, the additional bandwidth helps you distinguish speech from loud background noise. First responders and construction workers will appreciate the boost.

The speaker on the DuraXE Epic is on the loud side for voice phones, but it isn't necessarily loud so much as big. Sound comes out of large dual speakers below the keyboard. I measured 95dB in the earpiece and 92.6dB six inches from the speaker. The quality of the sound was different from other voice phones: a little bigger and a little sharper, perhaps because of EVS. Along with the earpiece and speakerphone, you can use a 3.5mm or Bluetooth headset.

The 1,770mAh battery gave by far the best talk time of any voice phone I've tested recently: 9 hours, 26 minutes, or about two hours more than most competing phones.

If you're used to voice phones having lousy cameras, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the DuraXE Epic. It has a single 5MP camera, just like the XP3 does, but its photos are bright and sharp. That isn't the best choice 100% of the time; in one photo of my bald head, my forehead was bright enough to make you squint. But every other one of my test shots with the DuraXE Epic looked considerably clearer than the muddy ones produced by the XP3. They don't rival smartphone photos, but they're far superior to the blurry, lower-resolution images from other voice phones.

Software: Quite Basic

Like many current 4G voice phones, the DuraXE Epic is based on Android, but in this case it's Android 10, not the Android 8.1 I've seen on some other devices.

The basic interface is very speedy and responsive, more so than on most voice phones. For music, you have an FM radio and a music player that plays files from local storage. There's also a web browser and a very basic email program. There's no way to sync contacts with a smartphone or cloud service.

One nice touch is that group text messages work properly, something you can't always count on with voice phones. Group texts come in threaded properly, and when you reply, you reply to the whole group.

The predictive text software is weird, though. Rather than automatically choosing the most common word for your tap sequence, it displays by default what you would see if you were using triple-tap—usually gibberish—and then shows the predictive options below, so you have to click down to choose one. It requires more clicks than it should.

I didn't test AT&T's push-to-talk software, as it requires a special subscription, but at least it doesn't consume the battery while running in the background the way it does on the Kyocera Duraforce Ultra 5G UW.

Tough and Capable

The Sonim XP3 is a very good voice phone; the Kyocera DuraXE Epic is just a bit better, earning our Editors' Choice award. If you find them priced the same, the DuraXE Epic is the top choice for AT&T.

Both phones are expensive, but you get what you pay for in terms of durability, reliability, and volume. As the XP3 is an older phone, you may find it for significantly less money, which could change your equation a bit. If you need a small voice phone under $100, take a look at the Nokia 6300 4G instead. But if what you need is a phone you can drop on cement, hear over a siren or a jackhammer, and use for most of a day between charges, the DuraXE Epic is worth every penny.