Motorola Pro+ Qwerty Android smartphone Motorola’s been keeping its hand in with an interesting variety of Android handsets of late. The Pro+ is clearly designed for business rather than fun, which is fine, but next to the top-end, revitalised Motorola Razr, it’s not in the same league. Motorola Pro+ Qwerty Android smartphone Doing the business: Motorola's Pro+ …
I know LarsG already said it, but it's that ugly it deserves to be said twice.
To many, I'm sure, a smartphone is just a phone with more bells and whistles and so perhaps aesthetics shouldn't count, but when the other phones on the market are so much nicer looking and provide the same functionality, in some cases, better, then there's no excuse for making a phone that looks like it hit every branch as it fell out of the ugly-design-tree....
I found this review a bit harsh.
Granted, 512MB of memory, a single 1GHz processor and 5MP camera is on the weak side given the latest crop of smartphones. The latter point is of lesser importance to me because no phone camera could rival my 12MP dedicated camera (a Panasonic).
But, for God's sake, this is the only Android smartphone with a non-slide QWERTY keyboard like the Blackberry. And given the price - a mere C$350 + taxes (total: C$400 without a contract)! - this is a great deal. Add $25 to unlock, and you are ready to enjoy this unique form factor worldwide! By comparison, the latest crop of smartphones I was referring to earlier cost nearly double (e.g. Samsung Galaxy S II at C$600 + taxes).
The review says one thing right: the battery life is great. One day and a half of intensive use, maybe. But in my normal (less intensive?) routine, it lasts 3-4 days easy.
So, coming back to the above title, if you judge this smartphone on its qualities (e.g. VGA screen, battery life, serious apps and admittedly nothing more than decent performance) relative to its dirty cheap price, I would say it deserves at least a 80%.
You can't compare it to the Razr, that costs well over £100 more.
Also the numbers are ranged across the top of the keyboard because you use the screen to dial.
I'm also not quite sure how a 258dpi screen can be called lackluster. OK Motorola has set the default brightness a bit low but on an enterprise handset that's not a wholly stupid idea with an eye on battery life and seems to pay dividends.
Couple of things I like to have seen covered - how much of the 4GB is free for apps and how do alternate launchers like Go Launcher EX work on a screen that shape? I'm guessing that with a better launcher this handset is a bit of a cracker.
ps..."you'd no doubt become familiar with it over time"....you mean just like every other keyboard under the sun?
"a numeric keypad layout like the latest BlackBerrys have been using."
Why, when the dialer is on-screen (as already mentioned)? But that said...
You mean a numeric keypad layout like the Nokia E series keyboards used, maybe five or more years ago?
Like the one on the Nokia E7x I still use?
Maybe someone should have patented it. Maybe they did, who knows.
Nokia. Where did it all go wrong.
the e71 is where nokia went wrong. for me anyway.
on paper it seemed ideal. better than the e61i it was replacing;
* support for more than 2gb of memory cards and more memory
* fm radio
* camera flash
* standard 3.5mm head phone socket
* longer battery life.
* faster cpu
and then i used one for a while;
* global search was painfully slow if the phone had lots of information. around a minute to start as it preloaded all the data to 'speed' up searches.
* headphone socket mounted on the side so that it damaged the headphones i was using when i put the phone in my pocket crazy person that i am.
* fragile, i dropped mine within a week of getting it and the keyboard popped out. it went back in ok and never happened again but after the sheer indestrucibleness of the e61s...
* shutting down all running apps and rescanning my memory card for media everytime i ejected it to copy stuff on and off. and no way to turn that off. annoying.
* and adding a not required by irish law camera click in firmware update made me give it away and promise to never buy nokia again.
these days i use a samsung galaxy pro. nice!
To me almost all these smartphones miss the main point of their existence. I hate greasy, scratchable, un-tactile touchscreens for dialling, and I don't want a miniscule QWERTY keyboard.
I want a PHONE with a PHONE keypad, you know, with numbers on it. As far as I can see the Blackberry Pearl3G is the only smartphone out there that answers this description... not a problem for me just now as I've only had mine a year and hope it lasts a good bit longer yet, but surely I'm not the only one who wants this?
Predictive text has worked well for over a decade now - it's fine for firing off the odd email when out and about, and I'd far rather 12 buttons I can actually find to press individually than fight with the needle-in-a-haystack struggle you end up with when trying to cram a full QWERTY keyboard into a tiny phone.
I agree to an extent. I'm amazed there isn't a verticle slider on the market with a standard keypad on it. These were all the rage five years ago (Nokia 7650 etc) and would seem ideal as a decent compromise between touch-screen entertainment and keypadded "getting things done".
That said, I've owned full QWERTY keyboard phones for the best part of a decade and, despite being 1.92m with coal-shovel hands I have never had a problem with them. Sure, they take a few days to get used to but then T9 takes me a few days to get used to each time I have to go back to it and capacative screens caused months of frustration after many years of resistive/stylus use.
Predictive text on a physical keypad is the one thing I do miss since everything became touch screen. I could type respectably quickly if I used both thumbs and I could type using one thumb without having to look at the phone.
Still, that's progress. Pure functionality doesn't sell as well as big screens and slick animated UIs.
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