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Kyocera Rise brings Android 4.0 and QWERTY to Sprint and Virgin this month starting at $19.99

Kyocera Rise brings Android 4.0 and QWERTY to Sprint and Virgin this month starting at $19.99

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The Kyocera Rise will be arriving at Sprint on August 19th and Virgin Mobile on August 31st for $19.99 and $99.99, respectively.

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Kyocera Rise
Kyocera Rise

Avid texters and messaging enthusiasts looking for an affordable QWERTY slider will be happy to hear that the Kyocera Rise will be arriving at Sprint and Virgin Mobile for $19.99 and $99.99, respectively. Sprint's variant will be released on August 19th with a two-year contract while Virgin Mobile's contract-free model will arrive on the 31st. When we first looked at the Rise — which includes a 3.5 inch 480 x 320 display and Android 4.0 running on a 1GHz single-core Snapdragon processor — we found it to be a reasonable option for smartphone newcomers.

The full $99.99 price tag on Virgin Mobile is less than half that of the keyboard-less HTC One V and Motorola Triumph, each running identical processors, though real-world performance is unlikely to be the same. On Sprint the similarly priced ZTE Fury offers a better camera at 5 megapixels (versus the Rise's 3.2 megapixel shooter), but lacks a physical keyboard and comes with Android 2.3. While Virgin Mobile customers may be attracted by the $49.99 Venture and its portrait keyboard, Sprint customers have few options besides the $49.99 BlackBerry Curve for affordable messaging phones.