Wireless pioneer Kyocera has been playing in the affordable end of the cellular swimming pool for the past couple of years, and they seem to think the water's fine. At the CTIA Wireless trade show today, they rolled out two phones that upgrade popular, existing phones for budget carriers.

The Kyocera G2Go M2000 texting phone looks to me like an upgrade to the Virgin Mobile Wild Card. It's a black and gray candybar-style phone with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard for texting. It has a big 2.4", 320x240 screen, a 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth and a MicroSD memory card slot. At 4.4" x 2" x .7" and 4.2 oz, it's bigger and heavier but noticeably slimmer than the Wild Card.

As the M2000 doesn't have the AWS frequency band, it probably won't come to Cricket or MetroPCS, but is almost a sure thing for Virgin.

The Kyocera Laylo M1400 looks like a follow-up to their slim, budget-priced S1300 phone, which I reviewed on Cricket. This phone kicks things up a notch from the almost painfully basic S1300. It is a black slider phone with a 2.2", 320x240 screen, a VGA camera, Bluetooth, and a WAP browser.  At .7" thick and 3.175 ounces, it's bigger and heavier than the 2.5-ounce S1300, but you're getting a lot more here. The M1400 supports the 850, 1900 and AWS bands, so it could appear on Virgin, Cricket, MetroPCS, or even Verizon or Sprint.

Kyocera didn't announce prices or dates for their new phones - that's dependent on carriers picking them up.