Motorola Dext

For handset manufacturers, the huge pull that online social networking sites have on users has at least one undeniable advantage: they have a reliable way of encouraging more and more users to move over to new smartphones.

Better still, it's given Motorola a chance to get back in the game with an Android-based smartphone that's specially designed to put communications and messaging at the heart of the user experience.  The Dext, a touchscreen phone with a full slide-out keyboard has its own Motorola-designed interface that allows you to keep in constant contact with your favourite social networking services.  Is that enough to make it the first 'social phone?'  Let's take a look …


An imposting phone

You can hardly call the Dext a slim handset.  Underneath the 3.1'', 320 x 480 pixel screen--which, incidentally, could have been brighter--is a full keyboard.  The slider form factor leads to a thick, heavy handset (163 g!).  The back is covered in a material that is immune to greasy fingerprints, which is a good choice.  The whole thing seems reasonably solid, but there is a little give between the two halves of the phone, but it's nothing like Nokia's old Nseries phones like the N95.  Sliding out the keyboard is an audible process, which doesn't give a very reliable impression.


Switching it on is slow: it takes almost a minute.  And if the battery is completely empty and you plug it in to charge, you need to wait a little while before you can start using it agin.  In both cases, you'll need to be a little patient.


Although it's not perfect, the QWERTY keyboard is fairly comfortable to use.  However, the keys don't go in far enough and are too close together, while the space bar is far too short.  Worse still, the plastic used for the keys allows your fingers to slide over them, which obviously isn't very useful.  We found ourselves wondering whether we'd actually typed something or not and referring constantly back to the screen.  A few of the function keys are a little unnecessary, and the arrow keys are to the left of the letters: that's no doubt good news for left-handers, but it takes a little getting used to for right-handers.

The Dext also has a virtual keyboard, but only in portrait mode.  It's less useful than the physical keyboard and leads to more errors.

Customisation

Following the current trend for customisation on mobile phones, Motorola has taken its inspiration from some of its competitors and offers no fewer than five homescreens on the Dext.  You can personalise them with the apps already on the phone, or download more from Android Market.  That's all the personalisation that's on offer though: Motorola leaves the Android interface to do the rest, as you can see in the video.  It's not like the HTC Hero and its attractive Sense interface.


Browsing through the different menus is still straightforward enough though, and after a little digging, it's easy to understand which options lead where.  And that's the problem: with all of the different ways of contacting your friends (see below), the whole thing can see a bit jumbled at first.  It takes a little bit of getting used to, unless you're a mobile geek already,  in which case …

You'll have to put up with some occasional slowdowns and log, but this occurs rarely enough to be tolerable.

Motoblur: perfect for Facebook and Twitter addicts

The idea behind the Motoblur is clear, simple and effective, and the software fits perfectly with the current trend for online communities, which are becoming increasingly mobile.  In fact, it's almost surprising that none of Motorola's competitors, many of which have been much more active in recent years in the smartphone market, haven't developed a similar solution.

In an instant, users can manage their favourite contacts, social networks and messages from a single location.  You can update your status, and choose whether to push that information to every network you belong to, or only some.  You need to sign up to use the Blur app, and then you add the details of the accounts you want to use it with.  After that, it aggregates content from all of your networks in one place.


By default, it displays the information on one of the homescreens (see above), so that you can keep an eye on everything your friends are up to online without needing to open a different app for every site: there's support for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Picasa, Gmail and Yahoo!.  The system checks for updates every 20 seconds and keeps the display of status updates, messages and tweets up to date automatically.

Motorola allows you to back up all of this content on their servers in case your phone is lost or stolen.  You can wipe it remotely.

Multimedia

With a microSD card, you can give the Dext up to 32 GB of storage for music, photos and video.  The handset, which has just 150 MB of internal memory, will ship with a 2 GB card.

You can go online with the Chrome Lite browser.  It doesn't offer support for Flash, but it does render pages well, and quite quickly too.  One of the five homescreens is dedicated to the web, with some widgets pre-installed.  You can also store your favourites there.


The camera feels like an afterthought and the autofocus isn't very fast.  There's no flash, so you'll want to make sure light levels are good.  Video, which is recorded at 352 x 288 pixels, is mediocre: don't try playing your clips back on a computer afterwards.  The mic has a negative impact on the quality of the sound, and you can also expect a lot of jerkiness.