Products & Services | Phones

The Casio Gz’One Rock is a nice replacement of the Gz’One Boulder. It’s all black with a ruggedized shell. The round front display is less like duotone display and more like a LCD.
This workhorse of a phone conforms to the MIL-STD-810F military specs, which means it’s resistant against water, humidity, shock, vibration, dust, solar radiation, salt fog and altitude, as well as high and low temperature storage. The battery door is sealed nicely, a little tricky to attach the first time but overall a nicer design than that of the Boulder. It comes with a tool to lock/unlock the battery door. I’m not sure what you are supposed to do with the tool in between uses, thankfully a coin will work just as well. It does not come with the extended battery and its appropriate battery door. It’s too bad they opted to leave that out, I just assumed it would come with it. Strangely the charging port is also different and I was hoping to see the typical USB cord with wall adapter but it is the old-style cord so you would need a separate USB cord if you wanted to connect it to your PC.

Another inconvenience but probably with good reason is the microSD, which is now located beneath the battery. I’m certain this is for protection from water and probably allows for a better overall seal, not having it incorporated into the shell of the phone. This way there’s one less door that has to be sealed off. This phone can handle 30 minutes underwater at a depth of 1 meter (with all ports closed.)

The front now has music touch controls and a light that changes colors that serves as an alert. For enhanced listening it has a front facing stereo speaker. There is a clever new button on the front called “one-touch open switch” which pops open the flip so if you had work cloves on you could easily open the phone. One side has the charging port and contacts for the charging cradle that comes packaged with the Rock. The other side has the push to talk button, the volume rocker and the G’ZGear startup button that can be used whether the flip is open or closed. The G’ZGear features six very cool built in apps that have many options within each.
• Compass, which also includes a feature called World Nation. Essentially the compass shows something similar to a radar screen with whatever lies around you. It displays natural features throughout the world determining the location of that natural feature at which the mobile phone is pointed and measuring your distance from it.
• Walking Counter. There is no setup needed to see how many steps you take each day, provided the phone is with you. There is setup involved if you want to take advantage of the pedometer for miles and KCAL. Simply enter, Age, Height, Weight, Sex. It sets your stride length which already makes it ten times easier than any pedometer out there.
• Thermometer. What more can I say, who wouldn’t love to have a thermometer at the ready, especially at those times when you say, it’s hotter than $%&& in here. Now you can prove it. Assuming you know the correct temperature of $%&&.
• Tide Chart and 100 fishing spots provided by Surfline’s webcams, complete with the best time to fish there. Ebb and flood tides as swell as past and future sea tides. GPS will assist in finding the closest location.
• Sunrise/Sunset. Shows current time and position of the sun, time of sunrise and sunset, ratio of day and night in charts and graphs.
• Astro Calender. Shows the moons face graphically, along with age and days until a full or new moon. Shows location of the sun, earth and moon in a cosmic point of view along with phenomenon such as an eclipse.