The Sharp Aquos Crystal certainly doesn't look like a $149 prepaid phone. It's absolutely beautiful, and really stands out. Unfortunately, its performance doesn't quite measure up to its great looks. But after all, this is a $149 prepaid phone. That makes it a solid value for the price, especially if you like to watch a lot of videos on your phone.
Physical Features
The Sharp Aquos Crystal is the first phone we've actually used with an edge-to-edge screen, and the effect is dramatic. For one thing, it gives you the biggest screen possible in a narrow, one-hand-friendly phone. At 5.16 by 2.6 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and 4.97 ounces, the Aquos Crystal is even narrower and easier to hold than 4.7-inch phones like the 2013 Moto X ($99.99 at Amazon) and Apple iPhone 6 .
No room is wasted here. The keyboard is roomy for the phone's overall size. When you're watching a video, it's extremely immersive. The build isn't perfect—when you're looking at the screen edge-on, the edge-lighting is really visible—but it's striking.
The screen is a 5-inch, 720p IPS LCD panel at 293ppi. It's a good choice for this size; sure, 1080p would have been even better, but the screen has rich colors under real glass. It's a very high quality screen for a phone this price—it blows away the HTC Desire 510's uneven 854-by-480 screen, for instance.
Similar Products
LG Volt (Boost Mobile)
Boost Warp 4G (Boost Mobile)
HTC Desire 816 (Virgin Mobile)
Pushing the screen up to the top of the phone forced some other interesting design choices, too. The front-facing camera is at the bottom now. The earpiece, meanwhile, is the entire screen—a neat trick, but one that has a cost in muffled sound. (More on this later.)
The body is silver and white rather than black, and Sharp used a smooth silver plastic around the edges that looks much more premium in its simplicity than the over-ornamented Galaxy S5 . The back of the phone is a white, stippled plastic that peels off to reveal the SIM and microSD card slots; the battery is sealed in.
Call Quality, Networking and Battery Life
The Aquos Crystal has a very unusual earpiece: The whole screen vibrates to create sound. In my experience, that unfortunately made for mediocre sound quality. (We had similar problems with the Kyocera Hydro Vibe , which uses a similar technology.) The "earpiece," such as it is, sounds dim and slightly muddy, with lower maximum volume than I like. Transmissions through the mic were a bit better in my tests; the noise cancellation created a bit of warping in noisy areas, but not enough to kill the voice. The rear-ported speakerphone is of adequate volume, but transmissions from a noisy area were indistinct, muddy, and difficult to understand.
The Aquos Crystal is a Sprint Spark phone, able to hit Sprint's fastest LTE speeds where they're available. If possible, you should buy only Spark-compatible phones on Sprint, Virgin, and Boost right now. Trying to test in midtown Manhattan, I found lots of data coverage problems, a perpetual problem with Sprint devices. When coverage kicked in, I got speeds from 9-12Mbps down and 4-7Mbps up, which are better than I've seen on non-Spark Sprint devices. The phone also has Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n and the usual Bluetooth 4.0; there's no NFC.
Battery life was pretty good, with 5 hours, 2 minutes of LTE video streaming on the 2,040mAh battery when the screen was at maximum brightness.
Performance and Multimedia
The 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor in the Aquos Crystal is thoroughly midrange, and performance is decent, but uninspiring. Third-party apps are limited by the 4GB of internal storage (3.2GB available)—when I tried to install two big driving games, it was a no-go. There's a microSD slot, but unfortunately you can't install apps on memory cards in Android 4.4.2.
I found another odd bug that affected third-party apps: Sometimes the virtual buttons at the bottom of the screen don't go away, but an app thinks they did, so it cuts off some of the app's content.
When apps do work, though, they look gorgeous on that edge-to-edge screen. Netflix and Clash of Clans, for instance, both really spread out and made excellent use of the big display.
The Aquos has an 8-megapixel main camera and 1-megapixel front camera. They're both pretty mediocre, not standouts in any way. The main camera takes about 0.8-second to autofocus and can do a burst mode with shots every 0.4-second. Its photos look washed out and a bit oversharpened, and the HDR mode doesn't really do anything. The front camera is sharp in outdoor lighting, and fuzzy in low light. The main camera records 1080p videos at 30 frames per second; the front camera, 720p videos at 30 frames per second.
Music playback is enhanced by Clari.fi, a Harmon Kardon audio processing technology we first saw in the HTC One (M8) Harmon Kardon edition . I tried it with some of our sample audio tracks, and I'm sorry to say I couldn't tell the difference. Sound quality is good enough through headphones that it isn't really a concern, though. And video playback, as I said, is downright gorgeous.
Comparisons and Conclusions
You aren't going to find a prettier $149 prepaid phone than the Sharp Aquos Crystal, that's for sure. It turns heads. And if you primarily watch videos, play games, and send messages rather than talking, you'll enjoy the experience here. That said, we haven't found any low-cost phones with truly great voice quality on Boost.
The LG Volt and Boost Warp 4G , for instance, both have their strengths. The Volt triumphs with very long battery life, while the Warp 4G is a strong all-around performer. Neither will really stand out when they're waved around in public, though. The HTC Desire 510, meanwhile, falls down because of its dim, lackluster screen. That leaves the Aquos Crystal as the most attractive budget buy on Boost.
The Sharp Aquos Crystal is a great-looking budget phone, but its performance doesn't measure up to its looks.
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