Tag: motorola

For the past few weeks, I’ve spent some time playing with the Motorola Devour smart phone, built for social media interaction.

While it’s been a lot of fun, it’s time to give the phone back to Verizon. I liked things about it and I found a couple things I disliked. I’ve detailed it all below.

Devour’s Look and Feel

Right out of the box, the Devour set itself apart from most phones I’ve put my hands on. The first thing I noticed about it was its weight. At 5.89 ounces it’s about an ounce more than the iPhone and you can feel it. It’s also a little thicker than other smart phones, but the size and weight weren’t all that jumped out at me. The extruded aluminum design is reminiscent of a space ship you might find in a late 80’s movie. It’s bold and I like it. Both rounded and sharp, it’s in a class all its own, visually.

Equipped with a 3.1-inch HVGA display at 320 x 480 pixels, the Devour offers a crisp display with vibrant colors for a good view of the customized Android platform. Above the screen is the speaker and below it sits the Unlock, Home, and Back buttons. In the bottom left hand corner there’s a tiny touch sensitive navigation pad we’ve seen before on recent smart phones. As you might imagine, it can be tricky to use because it has to be sensitive enough to pick up your finger motion, but not enough for accidental navigation. Luckily, the settings allow for some adjusting of the sensitivity.

The left edge of this phone has the Micro USB connector, but it also has a long panel that slides away to reveal the MicroSD card and battery. While it can be just a bit awkward to put the panel back in place, it’s hard to tell it’s even hiding anything. I thought that was a nice touch in the design. The right edge has the typical volume buttons as well as the voice dialing button and camera shutter button which also activates the 3 MP camera. This leaves the top edge for just the well-placed Power/Lock button, which was just a little too flush for my tastes, and the oddly-centered headphone jack.

Finally, there’s the slide-out keyboard. With keys that are raised just enough and that glow blue and white, the keyboard looks as good as the rest of the phone and just a little space-age. Access to symbols such as @ and / are not placed very intuitively, though, so typing email and web addresses takes some getting used to. Otherwise, the keys are comfortably spaced and typing on it was easy.

Motorola Devour Features

The main feature Motorola and Verizon would have you look at on the Devour is MOTOBLUR. I don’t know if it’s the best thing about the phone, but it is a pretty cool concept. If you are active on Twitter and Facebook, you’ll love how it constantly refreshes your home screen with new updates from these servers as well as current emails. Depending on who your friends and followees are, you’ll want to be careful about leaving your Devour on a desk at work, though. You never know when your buddy’s idea of a joke post updated to Facebook could offend a co-worker. For me, the only down side was that the number of people I follow and have friended makes real-time updating impossible to keep up with unless a filter or group setup is in place. Sadly, either MOTOBLUR is missing such a feature or I failed to notice it. Still, I like MOTOBLUR because even though I miss many updates and see many I don’t care about, I’ve still caught a couple I’d have otherwise missed.

The Devour supports an array of email and instant messaging services as well as some popular features like digital zoom and visual voicemail. You can also check out the full list of Motorola Devour features.

Moto Phone Portal

Here’s something new to me. It’s the Moto Phone Portal. When you first connect the Devour to your computer, it installs its management software, which was so much faster than on other devices and just sits in the tray. Rather than having a bulky application you launch, the portal is a web site, served from your phone.

From the portal, you can view call and SMS logs, view, import, and export contacts with photos, and check out your photos that are on your phone. It even has a built-in editor so you can rotate and crop images. From the portal you can also edit ring tones and alerts and view the status of your battery, signal strength, and memory usage. The Moto Phone Portal was a nice addition to the package.

Conclusions

At $149 with the 2 year contract and online discount, the Devour comes in at $50 less than its direct competition like the ERIS and other HTC models on Verizon. It’s definitely a well-rounded phone with some unique features, but small things like the weight will have to be overlooked for the $50 savings. You might buy this phone to break away from the pack, but the real draw is its ability to keep you connected in social media better than other (and often more expensive) phones.