Motorola’s new low-cost handset fails
to shine
Motorola’s MotoSmart costs just over $150.
At that price you can’t expect great things, but some budget manufacturers do
decide to give you a few headline features. Motorola does this up to a point,
with some software goodies in the shape of its Social Graph and Activity Graph
widgets. The former self populates with thumbnails of your most recently
contacted, erm, contacts. The latter with your most recently used apps. But
otherwise little else stands out at first, or indeed, second glance.
Motorola’s
MotoSmart costs just over $150.
The MotoSmart does look a little nicer than
you might expect. The backplate is made from metal rather than plastic, there’s
a solid silver strip for the speaker grille and a thin silver frame that runs
all the way around the screen. The handset feels solid too, but performance
does not match.
The processor, for example, runs at 800MHZ,
which is slow even for a budget phone. Meanwhile, the 3.5-inch screen manages
just 320 x 480 pixels and lacks responsiveness too. We found it needed a bit
more pressure than usual for swiping. The camera shoots at three megapixels, so
images are good for Facebook but nothing more. Internal memory runs to just
165MB on the spec sheet, but when we checked there was a mere 128MB on our
review sample. You are going to need a micro SD card pretty quickly.
Internal
memory runs to just 165MB on the spec sheet, but when we checked there was a
mere 128MB on our review sample.
Motorola has even done itself a disservice
on the battery front with the 1400mAh cell struggling to get us through to the
middle of the evening if we had two email accounts regularly updating, listened
to some music, did some web browsing and made a few calls.
You
are going to need a micro SD card pretty quickly.
The MotoSmart runs Android version 2.3 and
here we have to say we can’t really grumble. It’s fine for a budget handset to
run this older version of the Android operating system.
The
MotoSmart runs Android version 2.3 and here we have to say we can’t really
grumble.
This is a limited handset. The Social Graph
and Activity Graph widgets will appeal to some, but they’re only relatively
minor things and don’t serve to lift this basic handset to a higher level.
