This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 11th, 2010 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Tech News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 11, 2010
For a hundred buck you can get a new Motorola $100 phone with a 2 year contract and mail-in rebate.
This is a very sleek phone with a full Querty keyboard. It opens like a reverse clamshell and the keyboard has to be swung around 180 degrees so it is facing you beneath the screen so it works. It also has a small navigational touch pad called the Backtrack that is used for scrolling and selecting menu items.
The problem is that the design is kind of flimsy. The exposed keyboard could rub against your fabric and start typing in your pocket. You could snap it if you twist the screen the way as well.
At 4.7 ounces it has a nice pocket weight, and its slightly cramped 3.1-inch touch screen. It has about 320 minutes of talk time. It also has all the usual features of a good smartphone.
The phone runs on Nexus One or Droid technology. It has a standard widget-based user interface. On the bright side, these widgets are customizable and run the gamut in terms of functionality: News, weather, search and a bevy of social networking sites are all possible to run on this phone.
The biggest problem with the phone is that it is hard to run more than one or two of these widgets at the same time. It overloads if you try to run Twitter, Email, Weather, Facebook and Text functions all at once. Also annoying is that it sets your search to Yahoo and not Google as most people prefer.
Motorola tries to address this by offering multiple home screens (accessible via left- and right-finger whisks), but there’s only so much one can do with 3.1 inches. The other thing is that the private data is not that personal. If someone borrows your phone they are able to see everything.
It is attractive and has a creative design. However if you like to take pics to upload to facebook you will like the 5 MP camera with a flash that takes pretty good pictures. Another benefit is the QUERTY keys are large and can be seen easily. It also charges quickly and easily with a USB port.
An annoying thing about it is that it has one of the flimsy battery doors that just falls off sometimes.
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