Motorola is cranking out Android handsets and its latest phone, the Devour, is here.
The Devour has a 3.1-inch touchscreen, an aluminum body and a custom user interface called MotoBlur that aggregates contacts and feeds from different social networking sites, such as Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, into a single stream. Priced at $150 with a two-year contract, the Devour will become the third Android phone to run on the Verizon Wireless network next month.
“The Devour is about streaming your social life into the phone,” says Dan Rudolph, director of product marketing for Motorola. “The more social networking accounts you have, the more value you will get from the phone.”
Still, our first look at the Devour was disappointing. Under the hood, the phone isn’t state-of-the-art in terms of its technical specification — it lacks multitouch, it doesn’t feature the 1-GHz Qualcomm processor seen on the Nexus One and runs an older version of the Android operating system. Nor does it impress with its looks. The much-touted aluminum body aside, the phone is bulky, big and very retro in its styling.
Here’s a closer look at it.
The Devour is a slider phone with a physical keyboard that’s much more pleasant to use than the Motorola Droid. The keyboard, which seems carved directly into the aluminum body, has buttons that are soft, yet respond firmly.
But at 5.9 ounces, the phone is a bulky beast. It weighs almost the same as the Droid but it is positively plus-sized when compared to its lightweight peers: The iPhone 3G S is only 4.8 ounces and the Nexus One is just 4.5 ounces.
What makes the Devour seem hefty is its harsh, boxy look. Unlike the softer, rounded corners that are popular among most smartphones today, the Devour is a rectangular slab with sharp square edges in a hardware design that is reminiscent of the Palm VII. Motorola and Verizon say that they want to evoke a masculine look with the phone but hey, don’t boys want pretty devices too?
The Devour screen is bright but not as vivid as the OLED display on the Nexus One and it seems to smudge very easily. Just a few minutes of using it left fingerprint marks all over the display.
In an interesting twist, the Devour has a tiny touch-sensitive thumbpad on the right that can be used to scroll through the icons on the screen and select one. The slider, itself, though feels flimsy because it is also a toggle button on one of its sides.
The phone has a 600-MHz Qualcomm processor that is a tad faster than the Droid’s but is significantly slower than the 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chip used in the Nexus One.
Instead of a removable back plane, the Devour has the cover for the battery and the microSD card at the side of the device — similar to what we see in a compact digital camera.
It’s an attempt to make the phone more stable, says Motorola’s Rudolph, since smartphone users have complained about the battery cover at the back slipping off in some phones.
Beyond that, the Devour has its basics covered. It includes a camera capable of both video and still photos, a 8-GB microSD card, accelerometer, Wi-Fi and GPS.
Though it’s the latest phone from Motorola’s stable, the Devour runs Android 1.6, which is a surprise considering that most of the latest Android phones use version 2.0 or 2.1 of the OS. The older Android flavor also means that Devour users have to manually download an update to get turn-by-turn navigation on their phone.
But what Motorola says will give the Devour its edge is the use of the MotoBlur skin, which is missing on the Android. After a quick initial setup, the MotoBlur brings in your Twitter feed, Facebook updates and e-mail and text messages into little widgets on the home screen.
Integrated contacts and data is the name of the game, so the interface aggregates corporate and personal e-mail accounts and display them on a single screen — though you can keep them separate if you want. You can also arrange to view new messages in a cardlike view (similar to the Palm Pre) or in an easily scrollable list.
There are some sweet extras. User can back up their phone for free on the MotoBlur website through their MotoBlur account. They can also track their phone for free and remote-wipe it if it is lost, a service that Apple charges $100 a year for with its MobileMe service.
Clearly, Motorola wants to get as many Android handsets out as it can, ostensibly in an attempt to give consumers the choice they want. But at this point, it feels like the process has lost its soul. There’s not much innovation in hardware design or in the user interface. The Devour is yet another cookie-cutter phone churned out to keep the corporate coffers full.
But in an extremely competitive smartphone market, it’s an approach that may not be enough cut it with choosy consumers.
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Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
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