Motorola Devour (Verizon Wireless)

Call quality: We found call quality on the Motorola Devour to be pretty good: we could hear callers clearly and callers had no problem hearing us as well. It’s easy enough to adjust the cell phone’s volume with the corresponding buttons on the side of the Devour. However, we should mention that we do have a few quibbles with the cell phone application. Often during calls if we held the cell phone too close to the face, we would accidentally dial numbers on the keypad. Additionally, there was no degradation in call quality when we used a Bluetooth headset, and we could still hear callers in a noisy environment, such as a crowded store.

Audio quality: The playback of music on the Motorola Devour speaker is solid; songs sounded loud, but not distorted or too tinny. The Devour sports a 3.5mm headset jack so you can use your own high-end headphones to listen to music stored on the Devour, however, unless they are also cell phone compatible you won’t be able to take calls. The Motorola Devour also supports stereo Bluetooth so if you prefer to go wireless, you can always listen to tunes via an optional Bluetooth-enabled stereo headset.

Menu/phone book: The Motorola Devour runs Google Android OS 1.6, so it’s not the same as the version found on the Motorola DROID (version 2.0) or even the HTC Droid Eris (version 1.5). So it has some newer features such as Google Map’s Navigation, which isn’t found on the Eris. It also has another feature not found on either of those two Android cell phones, Motoblur. This is Motorola’s social media interface. Just enter information for many of your social media accounts such as Twitter and MySpace and updates will appear on the screen in real time. Not interested in Motoblur? No worries you can use one of the other 5 screens as your home screen and never really have to see the Motoblur interface.

The Google user interface is fairly straightforward and icon friendly. To access the cell phone’s applications simply select the up arrow key and they’ll appear. Here are a few things to note about navigation. If you’re in a screen and want to go back to the previous screen simply press the back arrow. If you want to exit a program simply press the button with a picture of a house, since you can’t manually quit applications running on the Motorola Devour. For the most part, this is not an issue. Whenever you’re in an application and want to do more press the Menu key and a set of options will appear.

The Google Android OS is really all about having all your contact information in one spot and constantly synched. When we say all your contact information we mean all – including social networking sites, multiple e-mail accounts, messaging (messaging is threaded – so you can see a complete text message conversation in one view), and even photo services where you may have accounts created. You can add all pertinent account information easily when you set up the device. If you want to sync with your computer simply connect it via the included USB synching cable and it will appear as an additional drive on your desktop, making it easy to drag and drop files from a computer to the cell phone’s 8GB MicroSD card included in the box.

Messaging: The Motorola Devour can handle multiple e-mail accounts either corporate e-mail or web-based e-mail. We did find the mail feature is more of a nice way to stay up to date on incoming mail, but that’s about it. For example, if you delete a mail on the cell phone it doesn’t delete in the account and vice-versa (at least that’s the case for the POP3 e-mail), so there’s a lot of repetition.

Camera/video: The Motorola Devour has a 3-megapixel camera with a flash, but lacks a tiny mirror for snapping self portraits. Overall, picture quality is acceptable and we’re happy to report it has a fairly fast shutter. However, we wouldn’t use it to capture moments at say a basketball game. Colors are a little washed out and details are a bit blurry. Once you snap a picture, you can save it, trash it, or share it to a multitude of options including Flickr, Facebook, and various messaging options. There are a ton of camera settings. About all you get is the option to change Color Effects and you can zoom using the volume keys.

Additionally, you can view and shoot videos on the cell phone. Shooting videos is pretty easy and the quality is acceptable. While it’s a nice feature to have, you’re probably going to enjoy watching videos you download or stream from the Internet over a WiFi connection.

Music: As noted, the Motorola Devour has a music player. You can listen to songs stored in MP3, AAC (Apple’s audio format), and WMA (Microsoft’s audio format) formats. There aren’t many music-centric features included in the player, but it has the ones we’ve come to expect: Repeat, Shuffle, and Playlists (you can even create them on the fly). Plus, you can save tunes stored in your cell phone as a ringtone The Motorola Devour comes with an 8GB MicroSD card, so you will have plenty of room to store music on this cell phone. Besides adding your own music to the cell phone, you can also purchase songs from the Verizon VCAST Rhapsody application pre-installed on the Motorola Devour. Additionally, there are quite a few free music applications that you can download from the Marketplace such as Pandora.

Connectivity/Bluetooth/WiFi:You can do a lot with the connectivity options on this cell phone. Besides easily being able to connect to a Bluetooth headset (we found call quality was decent when we used the Motorola T505). When you connect the Motorola Devour to your computer using the included synching cable, you can even use it as a modem, however, you’ll need to have the correct data plan to use this feature.

The Motorola Devour also has built-in WiFi, so you can use this smartphone to log onto available WiFi networks to surf the Web or send/receive e-mail. It’s a nice feature and it just takes moments to set up. The only thing you need to know is the WiFi network you want to use and password if needed. We should note surfing the Web on the Devour wasn’t bad, but WiFi was often faster. Web pages loaded quickly and you could scroll around them and zoom in/out via the trackball, but it’s still not the ideal viewing experience on a cell phone. In fact, there’s not much you can’t do with the Motorola Devour when connected to a WiFi network, except make a call.

Look and feel: The Motorola Devour is one good looking smartphone. Maybe it’s the silver and black casing that feels as good in the hand as it looks that sets it apart or maybe it’s the gorgeous display. Seriously, this is one of the best screens seen on a cell phone to date. It also has rounded sides ala some of the first iPods. That’s not all; you can slide the display to the right to reveal a four-line tactile QWERTY keyboard. On the sides, you’ll find a 3.5mm headset jack, volume keys, voice activation key, camera button, and microUSB port. Also, did we mention that the battery and microSD card is hidden underneath a panel on the side of the cell phone? In short, the Motorola Devour looks and feels like a luxury device. We should note that it does attract a fair share of face grease and fingerprints. When the display is not illuminated that’s when you can really the see the marks, otherwise it’s not that visible. To be fair, this is an issue with most touchscreen cell phones currently available.

Keypad:The Motorola Devour sports a 4-line QWERTY tactile keyboard. The keys are nice to the touch and we only suffered a few mistypes. However, if you prefer using the touchscreen that’s also an option since it has an onscreen keyboard as well. We found the touchscreen keyboard was easy enough to use, but we often preferred the slide-out keyboard

We found battery life on the Motorola Devour could be better, but on par for many smartphones available today. For starters, if you leave WiFi activated the Motorola Devour will not last a full day. However, if you turn WiFi off and use the cell phone frequently to make calls, listen to music, as well as send/receive text messages and e-mail, this smartphone will probably last about day and a half before needing to recharge. On the plus side, you can charge the Devour when the cell phone is connected to a computer via the included USB synching cable. We should note that depending on what applications you download to the smartphone can drain battery life faster, practically cutting battery life in half.

• Motorola Devour Overview

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