Motorola very kindly supplied a Motorola DEXT unit for review. I’ve been using the phone for a few days now and overall I have to say I’m impressed. The DEXT is a solid performer, all of the functions I’ve played around with have been nicely responsive (probably a little more responsive than the initial, pre-patch release of the HTC Hero was), although flipping between homescreens occasionally lags slightly. The slideout keyboard is tactile and straightforward to use, even though the keys are all squeezed pretty closely together, causing me to have the odd fumbled keypress. I actually found the software keyboard preferable. In fact, I found I generated fewer typos typing with the DEXT’s software keyboard than I seem to with my HTC Hero’s software keyboard.
To look at, well, it’s not the prettiest of phones. I’ve heard some reviewers describe it as ‘frumpy’, which sadly sums it’s looks up pretty accurately – the design build looks slightly cheap and feels quite heavy in the hand. The three keys on under the screen also look a bit tacky to me. The 3.1 inch capacitive touchscreen on the phone however, is much easier on the eye. I found that images and video viewed on the phone were crisp and clear. The YouTube streams I viewed, for example, were sharper than I’d expected.
The DEXT is the first phone to use Motorola’s Motoblur social networking-based user interface. Motorola have heavily pushed Motoblur as one of the phone’s big selling points, trying to entice avid social-networkers with the promise of keeping you as up to date as possible with all of your various social networks and it works pretty well in practice. When you initially set up the phone, you can specify a number of accounts such as Facebook, Last.fm and MySpace and the DEXT merges all the contacts together. Motoblur syncs posts, photos, feeds, emails and contacts from all of the social networking accounts you set up and you can see them all at a glance with MotoBlurs widgets. The impressive “Happenings†app, which comes with the phone was one I found particularly useful. It lets you view a feed of all of the recent posts made by the people in your contacts list across the various social networks you connect to.
As a phone, the DEXT is a decent enough performer, calls were clear, but with slightly tinny audio if I’m being picky. I came across no particular call problems during use. Obviously, texting is straightforward given the choice of the software or hardware keyboards.
The phone has a 5-megapixel camera, without a flash, which performs about as well as you’d expect - not particularly well. Photos taken in just the right lighting conditions came out ok, but for the most part the camera performed poorly. Video recording on the device is perfectly acceptable, although, naturally, video quality is also dependent on the current lighting conditions.
Battery life is about par for the course for Android devices. I found during a day of medium use, I’d need to charge the phone up, but that’s obviously going to vary depending on what apps you have running and just what you do during a day. The quoted battery life is 6 hours talktime, 13.5 hours standby.
Conclusion
Overall, whilst the DEXT isn’t up there with the best of the Android handsets such as the Hero or the formidable DROID, it’s still a very solid performer. There’s not much to fault in the phone, other than it’s slightly disappointing looks and uninspiring camera. The Motoblur take on contacts and social networking is innovative and plays on one of Android’s great strengths – being constantly connected. So, whilst it’s not a world-beater, the DEXT is undeniably a good addition to the Android stable.
Full Specs-
- QWERTY slider keyboard
- Bluetooth® 2.0 + EDR
- 5-megapixel camera
- TFT touch screen
- MP3 and AAC player
dimensions
length: 114 mmweight: 163gdepth: 15.6 mmwidth: 58 mm battery life
standby: 13.5talk time: 6 hours
SAR value
Specific absorption rate (SAR) is a measure of the rate at which radio frequency (RF) energy is absorbed by the body. It is defined as the power absorbed per mass of tissue and has units of
SAR: 0.61 W/kg
features
- Androidâ„¢ operating system
- QWERTY slider keyboard
- Bluetooth® 2.0 + EDR
- 5-megapixel camera
- TFT touch screen
- MP3 and AAC player
- noise cancellation technology
- 3.5 mm audio jack
- external memory microSD
- 3.1 inch touch screen
- HSCSD
- WiFi 802.11 b/g
- GPRS Class 12
- GPS ="MsoNormal">A-GPS support
- 3G
- EDGE
- micro USB
- auto focus
- internal memory 2GB
- geotagging
- digital compass
- document viewer
- polyphonic ring tones
- speakerphone
- video playback
- video streaming
- vibrating alert
- GSM
- picture editing
- games
- tri band
- Bluetooth®
- touch screen
- camera
- music player
Thank you for useful information.
On the Motorola website, the SAR value of the Dext is said to be 0.95, higher than what is listed on this review and elsewhere.
Here are my impressions about Motorola Cliq:
Certainly superior because it is using google operating system , which is arguably the highlight of this phone. Well this phone is basically for people who are more into social involvement, it lets you update your status to various social networking sites at one go. All application at one place , rather then logging again and again to various sites .