The name may conjure up images of Claridge’s, The Ritz and
champagne receptions, but the MotoLuxe is actually a budget smartphone with a
low-end single-core 800MHz processor.
The phone feels like a classy item, though. Some budget
Android smartphones we’ve seen have creaky plastic bodies, but the MotoLuxe is
covered on its sides and back with a rubber coating. Thanks to the soft rubber,
the smartphone feel fantastic in the hand, and the four touch sensitive buttons
under the screen are responsive. An oblong cut-out on the bottom-left of the
phone glows with different-colored status lights for events such as new
messages and low battery.
We were impressed with the screen, too. It may not be an
ultra-vibrant AMOLED model, but the 4in TFT panel is bright and colorful with
reasonable contrast. It has a fairly high 480x854 resolution, and text is
sharp, clear and easy to read.
Topofthecharts
The phone runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread rather than the
latest Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), but then ICS has only just begun
to appear on a handful of high-end handsets, so this is no surprise. Motorola
has customised the OS; there’s no MotoBlur, but the app tray has a smart custom
skin and icons. The homescreen has also seen extensive changes. The biggest
additions are two huge widgets called the Social Graph and Activity Graph,
which are a cloud of contact pictures and app icons respectively. The Social
Graph fills itself with the contacts you’ve been in touch with the most, while
the Activity Graph fills up with the apps you've used the most. You can also
specify contacts and apps manually to fill the widgets.
It’s a neat system, but there's one big drawback - it slows
the homescreen right down. Flicking left and right between homescreens is a
jerky affair, as is bringing up the main applications menu. Installing the
alternative Launcher Pro homescreen and application tray speeds things up, but
then you lose access to the Social Graph and the Activity Graph.
The rest of the phone's apps run reasonably smoothly. It
took some fiddling, but we managed to set up our Gmail, Windows Live and
corporate Exchange email and calendars. The main problem was that we couldn't
add our Windows Live and Exchange accounts in the main Accounts section as the
app kept crashing, but adding them in the Email app meant everything worked
perfectly. There’s a unified inbox if you want to keep all your messages in one
place, and the calendar has useful weekly and agenda views, as well as the
usual month and day options.
Technical data
From: www..com
Verdict: A
fine budget handset that's stymied by a slow processor
Smartphone:
GSM 850/900/1800/1900, 3G 900/2100, GPRS, Edge, 3G, HSDPA, 4in 480x854
resolution LCD, 8-megapixel camera, 1GB storage, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi connectivity,
6.5 hours’ talk time, 450 days' standby, 118x61x10mm, 122g
Details: www.motorola.com
|
