Motorola Devour – Delivers on performance and features

For:

Motorola Devour has sturdy design and this smartphone offers functional features, good performance and spacious keyboard.

Against:

The display is small as compared to the size of Motorola Devour. There is a need to improve camera features and placements of the controls.

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Motorola Devour is based on CDMA2000 1X technology that supports dual band of CDMA2000 1X 1900/800. The Devour has slider design. It is powered by Google Android 1.6 operating system and 600MHz processor. The smartphone has inbuilt 224MB memory and a micro-SD expansion slot that supports cards up to 32GB. In addition, the Devour ships with 8GB micro-SD card.

3.1-inch touch-screen LCD display of Motorola Devour has a resolution of 320×480 pixels that supports 16-bit (65,000) colors. Supported wireless interfaces are Bluetooth 2.0 EDR and IEEE 802.11 b/g. The pre-installed instant messengers are AOL Instant Messenger, Wireless Village 1.1, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk. The additional features are Macromedia Flash Support, Mobile blog, RSS feeds, Accelerometer, Google Maps, Android Market, YouTube, Picasa and A-GPS.

Motorola Devour has 3-megapixel camera that has automatic focus adjustment and geo-tagging feature. Inbuilt music player supports digital audio formats of WMV (sound), AAC+, MIDI, WMA, WAV, MP3, AMR and AAC. Supported video formats are H.263 video and AMR audio, MPEG4 and H.264.

The interfaces of Motorola Devour include 1×3.5mm headset jack – mini phone and 1×micro-USB. In addition, the Devour is compatible to hearing aid. It has 1400 mAH lithium ion battery that has a life of 389 minutes of talk time and 443 hours of idle standby time.

Razzle Dazzle:

Motorola Devour has the same shape as the Droid. The Devour is 4.4 inches tall, 2.4 inches wide and 0.6 inches deep, and it weighs around 5.89 ounces. It feels solid while taking in hand due to its extruded aluminum, which wraps on all the sides. The metal skin delivers the protection and attractive sheen to the smartphone. The Devour has rubber sidings and tapered ends that gives sleeker look than Droid.

Inside Dope:

Motorola made a lot of money with Droid last year, it was a big hit in the smartphone market. Motorola Droid was the first phone for Google Android OS that offered numerous features and satisfactory performance. Now, the company has launched Motorola Devour to repeat its success. It is also the first smartphone to bring MotoBlur interface in the market. The touch-screen display of this phone is small and work has to be done to improve user controls. Still, the Devour remains solid member of the Android family. It is a good alternative for the Droid smartphone. Motorola Devour costs around $149 with a contract from Verizon Wireless with mail-in-rebate. As a result, the Devour has $50 less cost as compared to its predecessor, Motorola Droid. On the down side, the camera has less features and the display is small as per the size of phone. If you like the new MotoBlur interface and do not mind the small display size, then go ahead and buy the Motorola Devour.

Design

3.1-inch display looks very small on 4.4 inches tall phone. We prefer to have large display screen for better user interface. The display size might be small for placing the touch-sensitive buttons beneath the screen, which includes menu control, home button and back key. Motorola Devour has enough gap on the left side of these keys to adjust one more key. The thumbpad sits beneath these keys and on the bottom left corner of the phone. We do not understand why the company did not arrange all the controls in single row for enlarging the display size.

Power button sits on the top of Motorola Devour. The camera shutter, voice dialing button and volume rocker are located on the right spine. The volume rocker is easy to access on call, but the power button is not tactile. You will find the camera lens on the rear side of the Devour. The micro-SD card slot and battery are located behind a door on the left spine. You will also find 3.5mm standard headset jack on left spine. Micro-USB/charger port sits on the top.

Display

3.1 inches touch-screen display of Motorola Devour has a resolution of 320×480 pixels that supports 65,000 colors. It shows vibrant and bright colors. The capacitive touch screen is quick responsive without any lag, unlike Nexus One. It features proximity sensor and inbuilt accelerometer. You can customize the backlight time, brightness and wallpaper, but you cannot calibrate phone’s display. You will receive a vibrating feedback on selecting any option. Google Android’s user interface and phone dialer looks similar to other Android smartphones. You can customize five home screens with user-defined shortcuts. The menu has user-friendly icon layout.

Thumbpad

The company has introduced new feature – thumbpad located on bottom left corner of Motorola Devour. This thumbpad works as both optical mouse and physical control. You can press it down for selecting options and swipe your fingers to move between menu selections and home screen. The thumbpad is easier to use than toggle or trackball, but it takes some acclimation due to small size. You can adjust the sensitivity of thumbpad. Motorola Devour gives both physical and touch-screen navigation methods.

Keyboard

Motorola Devour has both virtual onscreen Android keyboard and physical keyboard. You can slide the Devour to access the physical keyboard. The sliding mechanism is so well constructed that enables to slide the phone for opening and closing through one hand. The keyboard is spacious and its keys are raised over the surface for easy typing. However, we still had one issue with the keyboard layout. There are three rows on it – top first row for numeric keys and other two for alphabets. The last alphabetical row has small space bar adjusted between B and V keys. We do not like the space bar placement. There should be a different row for space bar with some shortcuts or hot keys.

MotoBlur

Motorola Devour is the first device to bring the MotoBlur. The Devour shows all the email accounts, Facebook accounts and phone contacts in a master list. For more detail, you can go through the Motorola Cliq review at our website.

MotoBlur features news and weather widgets and options for managing the accounts on different social networking Web sites including Photobucket, Piccassa, Last.fm, MySpace, Twitter and Facebook. This new feature also creates a universal inbox for unread emails from various corporate sync, POP3 and IMAP4 accounts. You just have to devote few seconds to configure the MotoBlur for your social networking Web sites account, like in Motorola Cliq. You can also use the MotoBlur to backup your emails and contacts.

Operating System

Motorola Devour runs on Google Android 1.6 instead of OS 2.0 on its predecessor, the Droid. This version is much better than Android 1.5 on HTC Droid Eris. Therefore, we recommend other smartphone manufacturers to embed the Google operating system.

Applications and Email Accounts

Motorola Devour has Google applications such as Google Maps Navigation with Google Maps, YouTube, Google search, Google Talk and Gmail. The other features include stereo Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, internal compass, A-GPS, Microsoft QuickOffice, speaker independent voice dialing and voice commands, Flash Lite supportable Web browser, visual voice mail and calculator. It also has multi-touch support for double tap only and not for zoom and pinch.

Motorola Devour supports extensive email features. The messaging features include instant messaging, support for POP3/IMAP4/SMTP accounts, multimedia and text messaging, and Microsoft Exchange support. We setup Google account for testing and synchronized with our Exchange as well.

Camera

Motorola Devour features a 3-megapixel camera that works both as still camera and camcorder. The still camera captures images in three different resolutions. It has options for geo-tagging and color effects. We would recommend Motorola to include more camera features. There is a picture gallery application that allows managing captured photographs. It has attractive user-interface with slideshow option. The photo quality is good. We captured some still images for testing. The images were little dark and had some noise.

The camcorder records the video clips at 23fps in four different quality settings. The MMS clips are limited to one minute, but you can record long videos in standard mode. There is a handy meter in both still camera and camcorder modes, which informs about the storage space limit.

Music Player

Motorola Devour has inbuilt music player that has similar interface like other Android smartphones. Its features include play-lists, repeat and shuffle modes. As per our previous recommendations, the Google Android and Motorola both have to work to improve the music player features and interface. You can easily transfer the music to memory card via USB cable.

Services and Applications

Verizon Wireless has also added some of it services in Motorola Devour like V Cast Music with Rhapsody for downloading on the air music, V Cast streaming video for accessing online video contents and VZ Navigator for GPS.

Motorola Devour ships with pre-installed applications including Moto Phone Portal to connect with computer via GPS or Wi-Fi for transferring files. It also has inbuilt Media Share that allows to share the media files with any other device. Moreover, you can also download the numerous games and applications from Android Market. These downloaded contents will be saved to internal memory and could not be transferred to memory card.

Call Quality

We made few calls through dual-band based Motorola Devour via Verizon Wireless service. The overall call quality was passable. The signal strength was clear and strong even in underground basements and elevators, where other service providers failed on testing. We received clear and natural sound at our end without static or distortion. However, the volume was low and we could not hear the voices in loud places.

The callers received our sound with background buzz at their end and they could tell that we were using a cell phone. The speakerphone call quality was clear and loud. We both did not get any problem during conversation.

Motorola Devour is using 600MHz processor that is better than 528MHz processor of the Cliq. The music quality is good from the external speaker. We will recommend you to use headset for better sound. GPS locate function is also better than previous Android phones and it could locate our position quickly

Battery Life

Motorola Devour has a battery life of 18.45 days of idle standby time and 6.48 hours of talk time. The digital SAR is 0.45 watts per kg as per FCC radiation tests.

Verdict:

Motorola Devour delivers good features with MotoBlur. If you need a smartphone with good performance, nice feature set and latest interface, then you can buy this new smartphone – Motorola Devour.