Motorola Devour Cell Phone Review

Functionality

The Devour runs Android 1.6, making it not quite as capable as the Droid which uses Android 2.0. However, we liked the slide-out keyboard on the Devour much better than the Droid keyboard. As shown in Figure 13, the keyboard is a QUERTY style with three rows of dedicated alphabet keys. The blue Fn key on the bottom right is pressed to access the symbols shown in blue at the top of the alpha keys. What is somewhat unusual about the set up is that the top row is dedicated to numeric keys. This key arrangement make the space bar key much smaller than most, but all-in-all, we found this setup very useable.

Figure 13: The Devour keyboard.

The keyboard slides out quickly and easily and can be opened and closed with one hand. Figure 13 shows the open keyboard. The silver base that holds the keyboard is a one-piece construction that curves up at the sides. This makes the phone easy to hold when using the keyboard. It also gives the phone a wonderfully sturdy high-tech look and feel. The black keyboard keys are a little elevated and have a slight tactile response when pressed. Everything is centered. We loved this keyboard.

The Devour is Verizon’s first Motorola phone with Motoblur. This is a widget-based system that congregates a variety of social networking portals. So it allows you to access Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter on your Devour without having to open the browser and log into each service. Once you create a Motoblur account, the feeds and data from these services are pushed to your Devour and integrated in the home screen. It all work quite seamlessly.

You can use also use Motoblur to back up your contacts but its real beauty is that if your Devour is lost or stolen you can log into your Motoblur account from any computer and lock and locate your phone remotely. While we liked MotoBlur, the small screen on the Devour made the Motoblur information seem extremely cluttered, as you can see in Figure 14.

Figure 14: The Motoblur home screen.

With the included 8GB memory card, you can store a lot of music on this cell phone. The music can be easily transferred from your computer. The music player, although not as elegant as the iPod, is perfectly acceptable. It supports playlists, shuffle, and repeat modes. The external speaker at the bottom of the phone is loud enough to listen to music and, of course, you can always add a pair of headphones. The Devour has Bluetooth and also supports Bluetooth in stereo.

Phone calls were crisp and clear through the Verizon network. We had no problems with the reception and those we called had no complaints about the quality of the calls. Our only gripe was a bit of slowness that we found throughout the phone use. In placing calls, when we needed to access the keypad to enter a number or an extension, there was a slight lag in having the keypad appear on the screen. Although slight, this was aggravating.

We also found this slowness in our web browsing. Although we enjoyed the web interface and found it very useable, we often encountered a slight lag.

Multitouch support includes double tap, but not pinch and zoom. However, you can use the icons that appear on the screen to easily zoom in and out. Also Motorola included Flash Lite in the web browser, which makes browsing certain sites better. Some sites that come up blank on the iPhone or the Droid, will appear on the Devour. The GPS functionality was very good.

Unfortunately, we had several crashes on the Devour. There were times when the camera stopped working throwing up an error on the screen and also several freezes when performing other ordinary functions.

The Devour has a 3-megapixel camera. We were found the camera’s performance adequate. Like many camera phones, you really need to hold the phone very still to take a good-blurless photo. We found outside shots to be pretty good, while most inside shots were a little on the dark side. Although there is no macro mode, closeup shots turned out better than expected (if you can keep your hand steady). There are only a few editing options and no geotagging, but the slideshow option in the Picture Gallery works nicely.

The Devour also has a camcorder that shoots clips at 23 frames per second in four quality settings. The video quality is nothing to write home about, but the videos are adequate for multimedia messaging and an occasional YouTube posting.

Email support is very good. The Devour supports push email for gmail and for exchange. You can sync your Outlook calendar and get a unified calendar. The Devour also supports other communication options including instant messaging, texting, and multimedia messaging.

The battery life on the Devour could be better. Although its battery life is rated at 6 hours and 28 minutes of talk time and 18 days and 10 hours, we found that we were constantly recharging the phone. In some cases it lasted the entire day, in others it didn’t. As with all smart phones, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth sucked up a lot of power. Bottom line is that if you buy this phone you will want to purchase a car adapter and/or carry the charging cab
le with you.