Gadgetory

what's up everyone John rhett injure the TechnoBuffalo here they full review for you of the Motorola devour this is a new Android smartphone on Verizon Wireless service currently only available from Best Buy Mobile for about a hundred bucks on two-year contract but it will be able to be picked up from a Verizon Wireless store in the near future this is sitting on top of the older version Android 1.6 with Motorola's own UI scheme called motoblur which I'll show you in just a moment and those are you wondering at home 1.6 is the latest version of Android that lets you run Google Maps Navigation so if you have a 1.5 device you're a dork but 1.6 or newer like this will let you have free turn-by-turn directions a pretty nice feature if I don't say so myself so before we get into all of these specs and features and reviews let's talk about the phone quality because no matter what a food does it makes crappy phone calls it's not gonna be as much use to you so my experience with the Devourer was very similar to most of the Verizon phones that I've tested quite good call quality was crystal-clear I hear no white noise or distortion on my end caller on the other end had no distortion or white noise on their end as well speakerphone was quite loud there's a very large grill on the back I was able to even use it in a car with a phone on my lap and I could hear the caller just fine and they could hear me so if you're worried about this as a phone don't you're going to be very very happy so let's talk a bit about the screen since we're gonna be looking at most of the time it's a 3.1 inch screen with a very very very large bezel it is a 320 by 480 resolution 16-bit colours have been over 600 or 65,000 the bezel though is a bit weird this is sort of where the phone gets a bit quirky it's got a very large front facade not much of which is taken out by the screen you've got three capacitive buttons you're at the LED indicator you may see blinking blue but that's really just a bit you've got enough to go trackpad right here which we'll talk about in just a minute the phone for as large as is has a very small screen it becomes apparent when you're holding the device it's got a lot of weight and heft to it it certainly by no means a thin phone you flip it on its side and you'll see that it does have quite a bit of heft and weight if I go ahead and bring in something like the Droid which is a much more powerful the Devourer is thicker which is a strange choice for Motorola who make both phones and will bring the Droid back in just a minute so navigation why is your most your navigation on screen or using this optical trackpad generally I've liked up to attract pads in the past and the implementation here works all that well scrolling on it was not very smooth oftentimes was an error terribly responsive I did like that you could use it in push it and make it a selectable d-pad but I was not the biggest fan of this ordinarily when I see a trackball on something like the Nexus One I don't always like that as much either but the trackball is a much better navigation implementation for Android these in this case then the trackpad is it's got a very high quality aluminum feel to it and you sort of sacrifice weight to have that high quality this thing feel like you could throw it off a building and it would survive it no problem I don't recommend doing that of course I'm sure it wouldn't but it's got that feeling of very you know high-quality materials made out of pure aluminum or aluminium depending on where in the world you're watching this video so it's got a slide-out keyboard it's got a very nice sliding mechanism - it's spring-loaded it shoots right up it's got a much nicer slide than the Droid does it also has a very nice keyboard I really like typing on this it's got a bit of peculiarities though as well notice that down below here there are letters as well next to the space bar so it's a little bit weird to have to type and hit the space bar but you get used to it they did that to accommodate a full number row across the top typing experience of typing wise the Devourer was very good and I give it very high marks for its keyboard the aluminium ridges on the side and make it nice to hold and feel and it always feels very solid in your hand so let's talk about the UI this is on top of so Android 1.6 you've seen old hat but this is running motoblur which is weird and kind of quirky the first thing you notice by motoblur are these new icons across the bottom so that brings up a new dialer the menu what's the same as other older Android devices same with the little slide thing on top the notification tray and the contacts look a bit different as well I'm not gonna show us that personal contacts in there but you can go ahead and get some more details about each person motoblur goes ahead and pulls in Facebook Twitter sort of integrates all of your social networking into what they claim is a unified platform you can get these notifications that pop up so you can get email notifications put our notifications you can send a notification to see what one person is doing or all your Twitter followers are doing right on your home screen if you're a big social networker you may like that I use Twitter quite a bit as some of you may know but I actually turned off a lot of these motoblur features I just turn these back on for demonstration purposes I dragged them all right in the trash I ended up using this phone just as I would a stock Android device and pretty much ignored motoblur I did like having the contacts right down below but I could easily get rid of that and just put a shortcut on the home screen so if you're looking to purposes for motoblur and I think it's gonna be a very cool immersive UI it's really not I think Android itself is very usable and and easy to use so motoblur seems a bit superfluous at least in this case and in its current iteration perhaps and future versions it'll gain a bit more utility right now I found it's just get in the way not only that it's also very a processor memory intensive because it's always pulling information so it's going to drain your battery faster you've got all those widgets open something to keep in mind I've had some issues in the past with capacitive buttons like on the Nexus One these work quite well they have any issue and I wanted to tap them menus came up and came up quite nicely one thing you're gonna notice - there's different notifications and you get on the standard Android device these are the motoblur notifications to go in and pull out the droid here you can see if there are a very different array of buttons on the bottom back button menu button home button and search you get your back and search but your menu button sort of looks like a Foursquare just a bit different if you're familiar with other Android devices and you pick up the Devourer don't want you to look at this and be like what the heck is going on so something to keep in mind so seeing as I just brought the droid in it's kind of hard to review the Devourer without thinking about the droid since they're both on a varieties network and there's about $100 price difference between the two in some cases $50 depending where you go but not a significant amount of money between them and this is where I think the biggest problem with the Devourer comes in you've got a phone that is less powerful than the droid yet it's larger thicker in all dimensions and weighs more than the droid and has a smaller screen which makes it a very hard value proposition the droid I found to be very capable worked really well multi-touch enabled you could pinch and zoom using the dolphin browser or soon with a 2.1 update the Devourer is not multi-touch capable unfortunately so even with the third-party browser you're going to be stuck with just a simple pan or zoom with one finger so I've got a very hard time recommending a device with completely inferior specs but a larger package those inferior specs translate to the camera on the back without a flash whereas a drawer you're gonna get a 5 megapixel camera versus the 3 on the Devourer and again no LED flash it's just very hard to recommend it a power I'm not sure who Motorola and Verizon are targeting with the Devourer certainly probably the feature phone crowd is maybe looking for a texting device or the fit more capabilities but still $400 more you're getting so so much more with the Droid perhaps the Devourer was $50 or free on a contract that could really see its niche and see its value and say you know what this is a great phone if you're looking to sort of get into the Android world and get a bit more powerful device before its price I had a very hard time recommending it that being said it is quite capable I didn't notice a lot of lagging and speed multitasking was quite fine on it as I found with most Android devices and again call quality was quite good so as a phone itself taking price out of it I give it a very solid three out of five it's lack of multi-touch it's small screen and it's sort of heft in bulk took away points however if this thing did drop down in price to again 5150 to free rather be a much higher mark and a really nice phone to a pickup keyboard easy to type on and things would just be a little bit rosier for the Devourer perhaps it could be a device that I may eat up sorry bad joke anyway this is John rende you're from TechnoBuffalo with a full review for you of the Motorola devour for all of your tech news and to create your own tech sub blog even monetize it and make some money sure to check out TechnoBuffalo com give me a follow on Twitter for exclusive Twitter related concepts at the John for Lakers I'm John Rhett injure and I'll see in the next video bye bye