Hands-on review: Motorola MotoSmart
Hands-on review: Motorola MotoSmart
We spent some time with the new dinky model from Motorola, and while the design is nothing new, there are a fair few features for those looking to spend only £100 on a smartphone (or £7 per month if you're one of those contract fiends).
The design apes handsets from yesteryear - the same mettalic frame evokes memories of the Milestone, the Defy and to some degree the more recent Motoluxe. It's certainly a premium feel for something at a lower price point.
The thickness isn't stellar at 11mm, but it doesn't feel super chunky... only compared to the anorexic dimensions of the iPhone 4S or Galaxy S3 does it become more of a noticeable feature.
The headphone jack and microUSB are the only things that can be seen on the frame, although there's also a volume and power/lock key which are easy to hit and have a pleasant degree of travel.
The battery cover is removable (yay woo yay) which means you can easily access the microSD slot and the battery, which is able to be switched out too.
Sure, very few people actually use this feature (or go to the trouble of buying a separate power pack) but given the consternation some have experienced at the feature being removed, it seems to be important.
There's a 3MP camera on the rear of the MotoSmart, with an LED flash too - it's apparently been given a boost in the sharpness department thanks to improved lens technology, although we're waiting our full review to really check into the claims it can rival a 5MP option.
Other than that, the design is pretty minimal - front softkeys for navigating around the Android system and not much more.
Speaking of Android, we're pretty upset to see Gingerbread coming out of the box with the Motorola MotoSmart... we know the phone is supposed to be budget, but that doesn't mean it could do with a bit of an overhaul on the software front.
Add to that, the 600MHz processor pushing things along is really not up to the job, and you can see why we're a bit concerned about this phone, despite the fancy tweaks on the user interface.
Motorola likes skinning its Android devices to look a bit different to the competition, and to that end it's good to see a bunch of new features on board (well, new if you've never played with a Moto device before).
The grouping widgets are pretty nifty, with the MotoSmart automatically working out which people you speak to most and apportioning them an appropriately-sized photo on the home screen. The same trick is repeated with apps: if you use the camera more than anything else, you'll see that app front and centre of the tiles on your home screen.
There's also the options to set profiles, harking back to the days of Nokia domination. You can set your home screens up to have a set arrangement of widgets and ringtones, and activate them in different scenarios.
It would be cool if you could do this by time or location, but we guess that's a feature for phones with a higher price tag.
However, and this is a big problem in our eyes, the MotoSmart stutters under the finger in much the same way the MotoLuxe does. We can't even begin to get our heads around the fact a large company like Moto can't manage to develop its phones to the point where they work, you know, properly.
We'll give the MotoSmart the slight benefit of the doubt when it comes to being a prototype sample, but we did the same with the Motoluxe only to be disappointed with the final model, so we're not holding out a lot of hope.
The slowdown is apparent throughout the phone, and especially the keyboard. Typing becomes a treacle-like affair, with letters taking an age to respond to presses, despite lower-powered phones managing the trick more than adequately.
The internet browser oddly doesn't seem to follow the same pattern though. We noticed a massive disparity in the speed between some websites loading - while it was all connecting over Wi-Fi, mobile sites loaded in a flash and others took many seconds to appear on the screen.
The screen technology is also not quite up to scratch either - we can't really condone a 3.5-inch effort with an HVGA resolution any more, even with lower price.
The likes of the Orange San Francisco 2 and the Huawei Ascend G300 both manage to pack a WVGA screen in for the same or less money, so the washed-out and grainy display isn't right.
There are some nice Motorola touches on show here though - for instance, the music player is still one of our favourite around.
The service can connect to download album artwork, has a dedicated tab for YouTube videos and will pull in lyrics for your song should you wish to sing along - or just find out what the devil some of the popular artists are yammering on about these days.
The other cool feature is the universal inbox, allowing you to keep a track of all your Facebook, Twitter, email and SMS messages in one place.
Some people will love this (we do) and others will find it slightly irritating, but there are customisation options in place to placate.
Early verdict
The Motorola Motosmart is a decent phone with a more than acceptable design for the price. At under £100, it's hard to criticise any smartphone too much, as you are getting a slew of top end features (camera, email, sat nav, hundreds of thousands of apps) in a tidy package.
However, it's the competition that ruins things here for Motorola. Three years since we saw the first 1GHz processor we could probably forgive not seeing it at the budget level - if it wasn't for the fact Huawei has already managed to break that price barrier with the Ascend G300.
And it's not always about specs, as we've seen some buttery-smooth user interfaces on the market using the same grunt in the CPU department, and the MotoSmart just doesn't measure up in that respect, offering some laggy performance which will irritate even at this price level.
We can't say you shouldn't get excited about the 'Smart just yet, as we've yet to bring you our updated and in-depth review, but given that it doesn't have the water- and dust-resistance of its Defy brethren it's hard to point to a strong USP for this phone - you'll probably be better checking out the competition or saving up a few more pennies and getting an even stronger selection.
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