Motorola DEXT Android Phone Review
When men first landed on the moon, they communicated using Motorola devices. Well, those men must have left Motorola behind when they came back to earth, and this is because, this American handset maker has been consigned to oblivion in the past few years, firstly by Nokia and more recently by Apple. So, it is just about time that Motorola comes up with something really good. Motorola just hopes that an upcoming raft of Android handsets will breathe some new life into the cooling corpse of its mobile phone and PDA efforts and the company has made a very promising start with the Dext. The Dext is the first phone in years that can be spoken in the same breath as the Palm Pre and HTC Hero. The DEXT is Motorola’s first foray into the Andriod territory. So, does it work? Read on to find out.
Design:
Not a super model:
With the power of Android, a peppy touchscreen and some fun social-networking features, there is only one big drawback that will keep you from loving the Dext like a long-lost friend; its frumpy appearance. It is a big surprise that Motorola, which is known for producing really gorgeous phones like the Razr, has taken a major design cue for the Dext from the Nokia N97. It is rather chunky, with a dull chrome trim over boring black plastic, and the white labels for the buttons on the side look like temporary stickers that should peel off but you actually should not. The Dext measures in at (H x W x D) 58 x 114 x 15.85mm, which is quite thick for a modern-day phone. It feels like two phones merged together; with a super thin iPhone-a-like on top with a chunky physical keyboard beneath. It is similar in form factor to the HTC Touch Pro 2 rather than the T-Mobile G1. It also feels rather flimsy, and the slider wobbles slightly. It’s a shame, as apart from being a little large, the Motorola Dext is a nice phone.
Keyboard:
The Dext is basically a slider phone with the consumer loving QWERTY keyboard tucked underneath a 3.1″ capacitive touch screen. It is the first Qwerty keyboard toting Android phone to emerge since the T-Mobile G1 from HTC. The 3.1”, 320 x 480 pixel resolution, touch screen display has its own keyboard, giving you the option of exactly how you are going to update your online statuses, which brings us to the point of this phone. The physical keyboard of Dext is a mixed bag. The keys are large and raised, but there is no space between them. Still, it is quite impressive that Motorola has packed them into a small space without sacrificing too much usability, and we assure you that you will have no trouble typing your emails and texts accurately. There is also a fairly good on screen keyboard, which is very responsive, although it does not offer the useful shortcuts to numbers and symbols that the HTC Hero does.
In general, we preferred to type on the physical keyboard, even though it can be a pain, because you are forced to flip from portrait orientation to landscape when you pop it open. In some cases, that meant we stuck to the on-screen keyboard when typing a quick missive on a screen that looked better in portrait orientation, such as a Web page.
Buttons:
Moving on to the user interface, the front of the Motorola Dext Android Phone hosts the three main buttons. It is basically a menu key, home button and back key, with the search button put on the QWERTY keyboard , which we must say is a more sensible place for it on such a phone. The keyboard is decent enough, with an Alt and Shift key (two of the latter) giving easy access to a number of characters, but the other keys are not so ergonomically intuitive. There is also an unobtrusive tiny white LED in the top left-hand corner, which blinks for notifications, and is just the right brightness to be visible without being annoying when you are trying to ignore it on the desk. The power or hold key is hidden between the two partitions on the upper right hand side of the phone, and no matter how hard we tried, it just was not easy to hit them. The camera button is in a similar place, and not only does it require a really hard press to start up, but it is also in a slightly tricky to hit place. On the left hand side, there is the silencer switch and the volume control, with the microUSB port at the bottom. The latter is not covered, so you better watch out you do not gather dust in there or else charging the phone will be a nightmare. The 3.5mm headphone jack is almost ornately carved into the head of the Motorola Dext, with sweeping curves leading to the protruding port.
The rear:
The rear of the phone has only two things, the dappled cover and the 5MP camera without flash. It is easy to remove the cover to get to the battery, which has a pleasing old school pull tab to remove the battery and memory card. Both the SIM card and the microSD are locked in by weird rubberised gates, we are not sure what is wrong with a good old fashioned push and click, but there you have it. It is not the most aesthetically pleasing device, and the large amount of give between the top and the bottom of the Dext is very annoying, but it is generally a well laid out phone and manages to stick a fair amount of keys and switches into a palm sized device.
Features:
Although the Dext is the N97′s cousin in terms of looks, it is definitely the smarter, more talented of the two. The Dext is actually everything we hoped the N97 would be, thanks to its zippy, attractive, capacitive touchscreen and a user interface that is a real pleasure to use. In addition to the goodness of Android, the Motorola Dext has a solid set of technical specifications, with a five megapixel camera, WiFi and HSDPA for fast downloads over 3G. It comes with a 2GB memory card and the slot supports cards of up to 32GB, and the standard 3.5mm headphone jack that allows you to listen to your favourite music on your own cans.
Browsing:
It is true that Motorola would love to take credit for the browser functionality, but it is very hard to see beyond the excellent Android browser. Internet browsing on the Android platform has always been one of the best mobile experiences on the market, and that is thankfully mimicked on the Motorola Dext. The springy and responsive screen allows you to move web pages around as easily as if you were using a mouse, and the zooming in and out is not as good as multi touch pinch and zoom, still works well. The internet on the Dext will give you easy access to full HTML options, and this android phone has a similar smart-fit ability to the HTC Hero, with text quickly re-sizes at the correct column size even after zooming in heavily. Motorola has also provided with an easy option to resize back to the normal zoom level thanks to the ’1x’ virtual button in the bottom right hand corner, and the excellent mini magnifier mode. The latter is a particularly cool function as it allows users to drag a little pane around a highly zoomed out view of the web page to find the text you want, before automatically focusing back in on it.
Handling multiple pages:
The Motorola Dext Android OS Mobile Phone is capable of handling multiple web pages, with a nice animation for each change showing the new windows opening a new pane. These panes can be accessed through the menu button, which gives you easy access to all the pages they currently have open. This screen can also be seen when heading through the bookmarks option, although it is not a patch on the visual bookmarks from HTC on the Hero. Copy and paste is also supported, which is activated by opening the menu and choosing to select text. There is no option to just hold down the screen to call up a menu to copy and paste, so you have to navigate through a series of menus. The accuracy is not the best at normal screen sizes, so if you really need some text then it is best to zoom in heavily.
No flash support:
There is no Flash support, unlike the HTC Hero, so the Dext does not quite manage to duke it out with the best Android phone just yet it may get updated in the future, but given the excellent YouTube application, it is not necessarily missed that much just yet. If you click a video link you will get asked if you want to try and view it in the Browser or YouTube; it is a simple pop up that has been around on most Android handsets for a while, but we still love it. Other Android phones allow you to share pages to Facebook, Twitter or other locations from the menu, but you can only share these sites to email and text on the Motorola Dext, considering the integration with Facebook and Twitter we cannot understand this decision. Another real problem we encountered was the inability to download well, anything.
The internet experience on the Motorola Dext is great, thanks to a great Android browser and the screen responsiveness puts it on a par with the iPhone, with the superb mobile Safari application on the iPhone, and easily the peer of the HTC Hero and Magic in terms of speed and performance.
Android Apps:
The Motorola Dext provides you access to the wonderful Android Market, which makes zillions of apps easy to be found and installed. A huge advantage of this is that, Dext has huge potential for growth, whether you are exploiting the infinite jukebox of Spotify or turning it into a Skype phone. Most of these apps are free, and, although they do not tend to be quite as slick as the apps available for the Apple iPhone, the Android Market wins points for giving its developers more scope for creativity. The iMeem Mobile and Shazam are very similar in style to the last.fm, that allows you to enter an artist and hear a song or two from them. Users can skip a track a certain number of times per hour, and favourite the ones they like for future reference. It connects quickly, works well but is not a patch on Spotify. Except for the fact it is free; it all depends on your favoured way of discovering music. There is no way to listen to the tracks offline though, so in some cases you be better off listening to internet radio instead. The latter application is the same as the 2-5-8-0 mobile service, except this time it is free and visual. It is still dumbfounding the way it can work out the tracks you are listening to, and now it offers links to viewing them on YouTube and to purchase them off Amazon MP3. This is just similar to Samsung’s Music Finder on its phone range; except the tracks it suggests cost around three or four times more than the Amazon equivalents.
Motoblur:
The MotoBlur interface is basically the same as HTC’s Sense UI but taken in a different direction. The Dext directly aims on tempting the social networking world by creating a social networking friendly handset through its Android-based Motoblur. To that end, Motorola’s tweaked version of Android, Motoblur, provides some additional features to help bring your contacts together. For instance, sign into your Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm and MySpace accounts, and the Dext will be able to grab all your contacts, including their profile photos, and then, merge them with your Google account to fill up the phone’s address book. The interface also takes the unnecessary hassle of updating your Facebook and Twitter status separately, by synching both so you only need to type in what you had for breakfast just the one time.
Online service:
Apart from the social networking, Motoblur also comes with an online service, which allows you to back up many of your accounts and messages. This online service is also handy from a security point of view, using the Dext’s GPS connection to have the phone tracked, hence if it is not in your pocket like it should be but has somehow made its way to Greenland, you can clear all of your personal details from the phone remotely.
Interlinking of the contacts:
MotoBlur also does a great job of linking contacts across accounts, and it is ace to be able to sort the contacts by name or recent updates – sorry, “happenings”. The device however, missed on a few of the simpler tweaks that make an address book easy to use. For example, if you have a contact with a company name and no personal name, the Dext lists it by phone number; this could prove to be a real pain for business users. The coolest thing about MotoBlur in contacts menu is that, like Synergy from Palm and INQ’s contacts system, users can link different profiles together under one name. However, the sad thing about this is you pretty much have to do it manually for every single person, in our case the list ran to 500 people; we are not that popular and, it is just what happens when you dump four different contact lists into one place. The device synchronises Facebook if the email address is present and matches the contact, but apart from that it will just list every name, meaning users are forced to manually link all their contacts. And the thing that is much more irritating is that, Dext does not seem to be able to alphabetize the list properly; it just lists the imported SIM contacts first and then moves to the rest.
Linking options:
Once the contacts are linked, there are a plethora of options available from that screen, and it is just here that the MotoBlur system comes into its own. Users will be able to see the conversations they have had over Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or text; and they will also be able to view phone calls between the two, send messages through a variety of mediums and see the updates from their friends too. Yes, and of course you can call as well, but that is very 20th century. Actually, that does raise a problem with the Dext when it comes to calling, you only have to touch a number in the contacts list to start calling. And the phone often decides you do not need the screen when calling and for some reason, automatically switching it off.
Happenings:
Once you have given the Motorola Dext all of your account information, the smartphone allows you to update your status in Facebook and tweet at the same time. The phone also allows you to send messages to your contacts in any one of umpteen ways. Motorola has also created some widgets that display your social whirl on the home screen which allow you to see your status, messages that include direct tweets, Facebook messages, emails and texts and the ‘happenings’ umbrella, is again a stream of recent posts from all of your contacts. We guess the heading “Status Updates” was already taken.
Messaging:
There is a wide variety of messaging options on the phone beyond the MotoBlur and the Universal Inbox, with Google Mail making its usual appearance on the Dext. But users can also synchronise another account easily to the phone through the email function, and add in Exchange support through a corporate email server as well. It is important to remember that, underneath all of this MotoBlur excitement is Google Android pushing things along nicely with its 1.5 Cupcake version. Simple tricks like threaded conversations can be dressed up how you like by the different brands, but the fact is that it is easy to see what you have been saying with someone, and adding an item such as sound or a picture is only a couple of clicks through the menu system. The Motorola Dext is capable of many messaging options, and it is a credit to the MotoBlur platform that you can interact with your friends so easily. We like being able to Facebook message our friends from the menu, but it has been done by INQ on a £60 phone, so we are not quite sure it is that exciting a move any more.
Social networking paradise:
It is a complete paradise, if you are well into the social networking world (who is not?), and it is helpful if you do not like to have to check your various networks separately. The widgets are fine but we would have liked more room for the text, and we found the happenings sometimes strayed out of the correct chronological order. In addition to the social-networking bells, Motoblur also includes an online service. This is very similar to Apple’s MobileMe and Nokia’s Ovi, not to mention a host of other offerings, providing a Web-based service that backs up your accounts and messages over the air. With Motorola’s MotoBlur, you will also be able to track your phone by its GPS signal, and, if it is not somewhere you think you can find it, like your house or your local boozer, you can wipe it remotely too. Read on to find more about this feature.
Maps and geo tagging:
The Motorola Dext has Pre-loaded with maps on board, we like Orange Maps, in the same way we prefer Nokia Maps when we cannot get a signal for Google’s version. Both are included on the Motorola Dext (Orange and Google, not Nokia obviously) and while we like Orange’s effort with saveable points and specific searches, we just prefer the familiarity of Google’s. Both applications pick up GPS blindingly well, even indoors, and respond to the touchscreen well too. We advise you take a look at both options and decide which is best for you especially as Orange includes turn by turn navigation.
QuickOffice:
QuickOffice application is yet another application that is quite interesting. It is pretty easy to tell what this one does, but the great thing is you can check out documents on the move, be it PowerPoint, Word or Excel. It is basic but functional, and we are glad to see it breaking out of its Symbian base to be included on an Android phone with the Dext.
Except for the tweaks in messaging and address book, Motorola has left most of the Android user interface alone. And this simply means that there is no multi-touch support; hence, you cannot zoom into photos or Web pages with a pinch of your fingers. You will really feel its absence as it is very intuitive and accurate, especially for zooming in on Web pages full of tiny links. If you have never used multi-touch before, you may not miss it, though.
Camera:
As we had mentioned earlier, Dext comes with a decent 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and geo-tagging. The image quality is not high, which is hardly unexpected when you consider the phone does not have a flash and a small sensor bolted to the rear of the phone above the battery cover. However, there are some nice touches; one of our clear favourite was only aesthetic, as when you twist the phone between portrait and landscape modes, the display spins the icons with you. It is a nice touch, and shows how much more intuitive phones are becoming in the age of the smartphone. There are also some nice options in the colour settings, you can do more than the plain old Sepia and Negative, now there is Solarise and Aqua. The latter is less exciting, making everything look as though it is under water by adding a grey blue sheen. But Solarise keeps everything the same colour, except the brighter parts, spinning them into a hallucinogenic colour scramble. The only other options users will be able to play with to improve picture quality are, Picture Quality (named Good, Better and Best) and white balance. It is not a lot, but we guess it can make outrageously bad shots look okay.
It also has the capability to record video at 352 x 288 pixels, which is just not on top of the market but will do the job for capturing your friend’s not so showable moments. However, it is worth mentioning that at HVGA and at 24 frames per second, which is considerable lower resolution than other comparable phones. For instance, the iPhone 3GS has managed to pack VGA recording, the equivalent of a DVD, and 30fps for a very smooth experience. Being a social kind of handset, you do get the options of uploading your Spielberg attempts straight to YouTube, Picasa, Facebook or MySpace.
Multimedia:
The Dext Android phone has a very decent media experience. Although it is a little basic, the company has tried to update this a little by introducing some 3D effects. Motorola has defaulted to Android’s basic media package for most of the applications, meaning it is a basic but functional experience most of the time.
MP3 Playback:
The Android layout for music on the Dext is the same as it has been for the Magic, G1 and Galaxy so far, with a simple layout for Artist, Album, Songs and Playlists. The UI for music playback is similarly simple, with album artwork, song title and other titbits of information next to some large and easy to use touch buttons. One cool feature is the ability to touch the Artist’s name, for instance, and search for content relating to them in the web browser or over YouTube. The latter is a nice addition, and especially relevant now the UK problems with the PRS are over and a multitude of videos are now available online. Music lovers might not see this as the ultimate audio device, but there is a simple library layout to the tracks as well as party shuffle mode; although we are not sure we would want to go to a party when the tunes are being pumped out by a Motorola Dext. However, the single speaker is a pretty good effort, vibrating the case of the phone with its power. It is loud, a touch bassy and not as tinny as others; it is not going to replace a sound system but for watching a video it is pretty decent.
Video:
The Video Gallery on the Dext has been overhauled compared to other Android phones and finally resembles something close to a media suite on a mobile. Not only are the videos arranges in a thumbnail grid, users can also tag videos. There is also a video editing suite for your personal vids, where you can crop the footage, delete audio or take a still from a video frame. It might not sound like much, but it is a big leap forward for the Android clan and something to be applauded from Motorola. Video playback still has the nice large icons for skipping and scrolling through the file, and it does not look too bad on the screen. Having seen full widescreen VGA screens on other phones, the playback can never look amazing in comparison, especially on a 3.1-inch screen, but it is just more than passable.
YouTube:
YouTube is back again on the Google powered Android OS, with a simple interface allowing access to a growing number of videos. It might not mimic the full breadth of the website version, but it is pretty good now and it will only improve in terms of content. The playback is the same as video files at high quality the videos look the same as if they were stored on the phone. However, you have to activate this quality mode which means some users will never realise it is available as it is hidden down a few menus. The Motorola Dext is probably the most full-featured Android handset on the market at the moment in terms of media, and with Spotify on board this will really rock.
Miscellaneous:
The Dext also comes with a digital compass, accelerometer and proximity sensor so it knows when you have got it up to your ear. However, open up a couple of applications (such as the music player) and the whole thing slows down a lot; pressing buttons requires a couple of seconds waiting, in which time you have probably accidentally hit another icon. It is a shame for a phone that promises a lot, perhaps Motorola should have done better than the Qualcomm 528 MHz processor it stuck under the hood.
Call quality:
The poor build quality had a brutal knock-on effect on the call quality of the Dext, with a loose speaker leading to a terrible buzzing noise during the calls; you can hear yourself speaking into the phone from the earpiece from some reason. It makes everything sound clearer, but it is very disconcerting. We think this might not be the case of all the Dext handsets, but be ready to test it right out of the box to ensure you have not got a dud. Sadly, there is no smart dial on the dialler, but that does not matter as users can instead pop open the QWERTY keypad and simply start typing in a name to access it. However, it is a very slow process and seems to stump the Dext’s 528MHz processor for some reason.
Battery life:
Given the Motorola Dext has a 1400mAh battery life, we are quite disappointed in its performance. Motorola quotes a standby time of around 320 hours for the Dext, which equates to around 13 days without needing to be charged. We gave the Dext a pretty hardcore pummelling on the first couple of days, connecting to the internet frequently, using the music player and watching videos. Add to that the fact the phone is constantly pulling down new Happenings, and you can see why the power would run down quickly. The battery was sadly flat within 16 hours, but in our opinion that is more than enough. As we dialled back the usage, we managed to extend that to nearly 20 hours, which means that while you might not get away with missing a charge night, day to day usage will not be affected.
Warranty:
The Motorola Dext Android smart phone comes with 12 months manufacturer’s warranty.
Verdict:
The Motorola Dext Android smart phone is no beauty, but, what is beautiful is that, it does what it says on the tin, providing a solid Android experience packed up with some handy social networking extras. The Dext may not be the best looking phone on the market, and let us face it, it will rip through a few pockets, but we love playing around with the social options this phone presents and feel that life is just that bit more orderly knowing that you have not missed out on that big Twitter announcement of who has died lately in Hollywood. If you are one of those drowning in a social networking deluge of updates and messages, the Motorola Dext might just be the answer for keeping everything under control. Throw in a full Qwerty keyboard, you have got an excellent phone that have been exclusively built for staying in touch. It sure has a few banes too, like widgets that cannot quite get their act together and terrible call quality, but a snappy touch screen and powerful operating system more than makes up for few of these drawbacks, making for a great android phone that we are sure you will be happy showing off to your friends.
The Dext will be available for free on a £34 per month, and two years contract exclusively on Orange.
Motorola DEXT Android Phone – Tecnical Specification Table
| Manufacturer | Motorola |
| Model Name | Motorola DEXT Android Phone |
| Dimensions (H x W x D) | 114 x 58 x 15.6 mm |
| Weight | 163 g |
| Colours available | Midnight Titanium, Winter White |
| Display size | 3.1 inches |
| Display type | TFT capacitive touchscreen, 256K colors (65K effective) |
| Display resolution | 320 x 480 pixels |
| Display Features | Accelerometer sensor Proximity sensor for auto turn-off Full QWERTY keyboard with 5-way navigation key MOTOBLUR UI with Live Widgets |
| Memory | 1 GB storage, 256MB RAM, 512MB ROM |
| Card slot | microSD, up to 32GB, 2GB included |
| Camera | 5 MP |
| Camera features | 2592 x 1944 pixels, autofocus, Geo-tagging |
| Video | QVGA@24fps (MP4) |
| CPU | Qualcomm MSM7201A |
| CPU processing speed | 528 MHz processor |
| Operating System | Android OS, v1.5 (Cupcake) |
| Messaging | SMS, MMS, Email |
| Browser | HTML |
| Internet | Yes |
| Multimedia | Noise cancellation with dedicated microphone Digital compass Google Maps with Street View MP3/eAAC+/WAV/WMA9 player MP4/H.263/H.264/WMV9 player Organizer Document viewer Shazam iMeem Mobile Voice memo/dial T9 |
| Radio | No |
| Games | Yes |
| GPS | Yes, with A-GPS support |
| Music player | AAC, AAC+, AAC+ Enhanced, AMR NB, MIDI, MP3, WAV |
| Video | Playback – H.264, H.263, MPEG 4, YouTube; Video Streaming: MPEG 4, 3GP |
| Playable formats | MP3, WAV, MIDI, AMR NB, AAC, AAC+ |
| Networks | WCDMA 900/1700/2100, GSM 850/900/1800/1900, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps (Category 7/8), EDGE, GPRS Class 12, AGPS |
| Battery | Standard battery, Li-Ion 1420 mAh |
| Battery life | Stand by: Up to 320 h Talk time: Up to 6 h |
| Warranty | 12 months |
