If you’ve ever longed for a phone to consolidate your Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, e-mail and instant messaging accounts into one inbox, your wait is over.
Meet the Motorola Devour, a brawny touch-screen phone with a slider keyboard aimed at those who are addicted to social media.
The Devour comes with Motoblur, an Android add-on user interface that can pull together all of your social media accounts. It displays the latest messages and updates on the home screen.
Motoblur runs quite well on the Devour’s 600 Mhz processor. Cliq users might remember Blur, however, it wasn’t as quick as the Devour.
Motoblur has its pros and cons. First, the good:
- Widgets can easily be moved or removed.
- When viewing a contact, you see the most recent status of the person at the top. On the bottom, you see whether the information came from Facebook, Twitter or Google Mail.
Now, the not-so-good features of Motoblur:
- Social media users either follow or friend too many people to make the home screen a significant tool.
- The Twitter and Facebook widgets show the face and text of the most recent update. It takes up about a third of the home screen. If you tap into Twitter or Facebook you get a one-at-a-time view of friend updates that you can swipe through.
- There is an inbox-style view for direct messages that's slightly more helpful, and the people button at the bottom right provides nice integration of status updates and contacts available on the device in a usable list view.
Design
The Devour is cased in aluminum and has rubber on the top, bottom and sides for a comfortable grip. I liked the weight of the phone, although I’m sure others will consider it to be too heavy.
The LCD screen is 3.1 inches and has a resolution of 480 x 320. Fingerprints are easily seen on the screen as I found myself cleaning it often.
The keyboard has four rows, the top being a dedicated row for numbers. The keys are small and slightly raised. Since my fingers are larger than most, I needed to use my fingernails to type messages.
A drawback is that the only shift and function keys are on the right. This is great for us left-handed people, but a drag for most. Also, the spacebar is awkwardly placed between the V and B keys.
Instead of a traditional door to access the battery and SD card, the right side rubber cover slides off. Inside is a slot-loading battery and 8 GB SD card.
The power switch is flush with the top of the phone making the phone difficult to turn on or off. I wish it had the feel of the volume rocker, voice command and camera buttons.
Battery life
The Devour supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS all on a speedy 600 Mhz processor. This usually means battery life will suffer. But a new feature has been added to stretch the life of a charge.
The Devour offers Battery manager and you can set it up several way. You can use one of three settings: Performance mode, Smart Mode and Battery Saver.
Smart Mode and Battery Saver will make adjustments to your screen brightness and disconnect data connections when not in use.
You can also make your own custom setting. For example, you can turn off data services during off-peak hours or when you’re sleeping to conserve battery life.
Pros
Great for social networking and consolidating contacts
Side-loading battery and SD card
Durable aluminum casing
Cons
Cramped keyboard
Inferior 3.1 megapixel camera with fixed focus and no flash.
Poorly designed on/off button
Conclusion
If you’re a social media junkie, the Devour can give you a unique all-in-one networking experience. While many people might opt to go with the Droid, the phones have different intentions. The Droid is more of an app phone, while the Devour gives you your entire life in one social stream.
The Devour is $149. Right now, if you buy one, you can get a second Devour free. You also need to buy a data plan with the Devour.
Specifications
- Operating system: Android 1.6
- Input: full QWERTY keyboard, touch screen
- CPU:
- Memory: 8.0 GB
- Memory card: microSD/microSDHC
- Storage: 8 GB microSD card pre-installed
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi, A-GPS, 3.5mm headset jack, Stereo Bluetooth
- Misc: MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA, WAV, AMR, MIDI
- Media: MPEG4, H.263, H.264
- Battery: 1400 mAh Li – Ion
- Talk Time: 6.48 hours (389 mins)
- Standby Time: 443 hours (18 days)
- Dimensions: 115.5 x 61 x 15.4 mm
- Weight: 180 grams
- Other: Pre-loaded applications such as Gmail, Google Talk, YouTube, Google Search and Google Maps with Google Maps Navigation; Adobe Flash Lite, Android HTML Webkit browser.
