Virgin Mobile's Kyocera X-tc

I just got this phone today. I had a lot of trouble getting it going. The simple instruction of "Turn the phone on" had me completely baffled due to the power on/off symbol having been modified to no longer include the formerly familiar circle with a vertical line in the center to simply being a red telephone-ish icon.

So anyway, I was trying to get started using the User Guide that came with the phone. I installed the battery without any problem and charged it up enough for the phone to (at least in theory) be able to turn on.

The next section in the Getting Started section of the User Guide said to Install the Memory Card.

Memory Card?

I didn't remember seeing a memory card in the packaging. I looked back through it again checking the fronts and backs of all included plastic and paper packaging. I thought I had read the packaging, but obviously not well enough. After double checking both the Virgin Mobile USA website and the packaging of the phone I determined that there had not been any kind of memory card included. The Getting Started section didn't tell me that this is an add on that must be purchased separately nor that I would also need an adapter for it to download mp3's from my computer to the X-tc which is also an mp3 player. Upon further investigation I found that the memory card, more properly called a micro memory card (MMC) or MicroSD, and the adapter could be purchased for a little bit under $30(usd). Since I didn't know this was something I'd need if I wanted to use the mp3 player fuction of the X-tc when I bought it, I didn't look around in the store for it. Therefore I don't know how the pricing compares off-the-shelf as opposed to online ordering. It turns out though, that the phone works just fine as a phone without the MicroSD.

I thought this would be a helpful topic to blog about since none of the top sites that came up on Google search seemed to fully answer my question about the memory card.

After an hour of research to track down what this memory card was, what it was for, and if I needed it for my phone to work, I finally managed to get the phone powered up with a little help from a buddy. The camera works well and seems to take clear shots even in dim light, so I'm looking forward to resuming my amateur cell-phone photography hobby.