Our 7 day test with the Motorola Dext

Introduction

Having found a new lease of life courtesy of the Android Operating System, Motorola have been busy releasing a number of devices running on this OS. Among the first batch of Android devices is the Motorola DEXT, boasting a slide out QWERTY keyboard and utilising the proprietary MotoBLUR User Interface. Motorola were good enough to send us out a review model of the DEXT, so we’ve had a really good chance to put it through its paces. Read on to find out how we got on with the phone, and our overall impression of the device.

Design

Without wishing to be too unkind, the design of the Motorola DEXT isn’t all that inspiring. If I were to try and find words to describe the overall look of the handset, words like ordinary, standard, even a bit frumpy, would come to mind. But that’s not necessarily such a bad thing; sometimes weird and new don’t always look good either. I think the best thing to say is the device is designed to be functional, and overall it achieves that objective. The Motorola DEXT is a nice size, measuring in at 114 x 58 x 15.6mm, and it fits well in the hand. The construction feels solid enough, although not quite as good as the Motorola Milestone. The DEXT has a fully touch enabled display, with a pixel resolution of 320 x 480, supporting up to 256,000 colours. Across the top of the display is the traditional Android task bar, within which various icons will appear, depending on the action being performed on the device at the time. For example, if you are downloading an application from the Android Market, then a notification icon appears in the task bar, showing the download is in action and also when the downloaded app has been installed. Other icons that appear in the task bar can be notifications of received email, incoming text, and missed calls. Some applications will also show notifications when updates are available, as in a new weather update, and also when updates for installed apps are ready to download from the Market. To get more information, just hold your finger on the task bar to activate it then drag it down the screen, to access the relevant detail.

The main display of the DEXT is very busy. It seems the implementation of MotoBLUR on this device aims the product squarely at the youth market, the look and feel of the onscreen widgets have a decidedly ‘teenage’ feel about them. In the main, the function of these widgets is to aggregate access to all your favourite social networks, with live updates from Twitter, Facebook and others delivered straight to the homescreen, making it easy to follow the updates and tweets of your friends. The MotoBLUR UI offers five standard homescreen displays, upon which you can choose to activate various shortcuts to installed applications or widgets that you have downloaded to the device. Some widgets were already pre activated on our device, including services from T3, Reuters, Discovery, Ministry of Sound and Hed Kandi. In use the MotoBLUR UI was easy to navigate around, and setting up email and access to Facebook and Twitter was very simple. The touchscreen was responsive, and faired well outside, although in the small amount of recent sunshine we’ve had it was a bit washed out.

At the bottom of the screen, are three tabs. One launches the dialler, the middle one opens the main menu, whilst the last one opens the contact information. Underneath the display, actually on the device itself, is a menu button, home button and back button. The menu button brings the screen to life from standby, and also unlocks the display, and the location of this button makes it much easier to use than the menu button on the Milestone. Around the outside of the device, on the right hand side is a dedicated camera key, which launches the camera application whilst near the top right is the power key. As well as turning the phone on/off, the power button can also be used for various other options. A quick press on the button will put the display on standby, whilst a long press of the button brings up a shortcut menu that allows you to quickly enable or disable various features, such as Bluetooth, WiFi, Airplane Mode and GPS. At the top of the handset is a 3.5mm audio output jack, and down the left hand side there is a MicroUSB connector, volume keys and a manual switch for putting the phone into silent or activating the ringer, in the same way used on the iPhone.

The DEXT incorporates a full three row slide out QWERTY board, which I found took a while to get used to. A lot of the keys have multiple options, and that meant I had to think as I typed rather than naturally knowing where the options I wanted were. The keypad is also rather compact, and the keys are slightly rounded on top, which I didn’t find particularly comfortable. To the left of the QWERTY keyboard is a navigation key, which was ok to use except for some reason I couldn’t get the hang of navigating around using it with my left thumb, being right handed. Thankfully it is not often needed; I find the navigation pad on Android devices only really comes into its own when I need to move the cursor to a certain point when composing text messages. So overall, whilst the look of the device may be a little uninspiring, the functionality and general layout is quite comfortable.

Making Calls

Calls: There are no hard call keys on the DEXT; to launch the phone application you just press the phone tab located at the bottom of the display. Doing so launches you straight into the phone application, and you are instantly presented with a traditional 12 key digital telephone keypad. You can tap out the number you wish to dial manually, or press the little person icon in the bottom left hand corner, to be presented with a full list of stored contacts on the device. Next to the person icon is the call button, which changes to end call once a call has been initiated. Finally in the bottom right hand corner is a one touch button for calling your voicemail. As you type the numbers in on the phone, they appear in a little bar above the keypad; should you accidentally enter a wrong number, you can delete back from here and try again. Located above this bar are four tabs, Dialler, which is the active tab, then Recent, Frequent and Speed dial. All fairly self explanatory, offering quick access to regularly used numbers on the device. Call quality on the device is clear enough, but perhaps a little quiet even at full volume. When on call the display auto disables, taking the phone away from you will re-enable the screen, and this worked well, quickly, which isn’t always the case with touchscreen devices. When in call if you have a contact photo stored for the person you are calling, this is displayed on the screen, and under the photo there are three on screen buttons, offering one touch options to either mute the call, or place it on loudspeaker, plus a button to launch the keypad for use with automated telephone services.

Phonebook: The phonebook application on the device will gather in all contacts from the various services you use, which can be a bit of an issue if you have an untidy contact list, and can also lead to some duplication. However, it is easy to filter out any unwanted details, leaving you with just the contacts you actually want. All Facebook, Twitter and Google contacts are listed in the device, and if you leave all showing, it soon becomes second nature to open the phonebook and start typing the name of the person you want. You can also scroll through your contacts by sliding the tab at the side of the screen, which quickly takes you through the alphabet until you find the letter with which your contacts name starts. If having all your friends and followers details listed is too much of a burden, there is a drop down filter list at the top of the display, via which you can choose to list which contacts are shown, from Google, Twitter, MotoBLUR address book or just favourites. All contacts show the avatar that person uses in the address book, and lists all numbers too. Various information can be stored to the address book, including personal details, email addresses, work details, birthdays, etc. Opening an individual contact through the address book also shows you their update history, and latest status, by scrolling through the options at the bottom of the display.

Messaging

As I’ve already mentioned, messaging features well on the DEXT, with simple access to various social networks, as well as including support for instant messaging and email. Texts are displayed in a conversation format that is popular with a lot of modern mobile phones these days, making it easy to follow multiple conversations. Entering text is either via the slide out QWERTY keyboard or an onscreen touch QWERTY device. The onscreen QWERTY works ok, but is very cramped, and does not make for easy one handed message composure. Rotating the device to landscape mode did not enable a larger keyboard, so it was either cramped touchscreen QWERTY in portrait mode or use the slide out keyboard, which presented problems at those moments when all you want to do is send out a quick text, which suddenly became a bit of a chore rather than something done in seconds.

Media

Gallery: The image gallery on the DEXT presents really well, all images stored on the device are gathered together into a single display and listed in rows of three. The gallery can be viewed in both portrait or landscape mode, and all pictures are represented by small thumbnail images which are easily swiped through. Down the side of the screen is a taskbar which lists dates, and you can slide your finger up and down this bar to find certain dates, which then jumps the main gallery view to pictures with that date stored in the digital information of the image. This is a pleasing way of browsing through the image gallery, it looks good, and is simple to use. You can also look through images by choosing a certain album to scroll through, and you can swipe through images one by one. As you rotate the display and choose a different view, the different views are changed to via a nice animation, which just adds to the presentation of media stored on the device. There is a separate gallery for viewing video clips on the handset, which presents in the same fashion as the image viewer.

Music: The music player, in comparison, has had no facelift at all, so we are presented with the uninspiring, if functional, standard Android layout. When you open the music player, you are presented with four, large, onscreen buttons, titled Artist, Albums, Songs and Playlists. Pressing on a button will take you to your music, filtered by the selection chosen. Navigation around the music player is simple enough, and playback through your own headphones works ok. Music quality was good enough, and fairly loud through the built in speaker. As with most phones, generally speaking, the music sounds much better when the device is laid flat on a table, if using the loudspeaker. Album art for stored music is displayed where available, and you can do web searches for music playing on the device by holding down on the relevant information. For example, when playing a song, a long press of the screen on the screen name will offer a web search on that term either via the web or through YouTube. The same option also appears for the album name, and Artist. There’s little more that can be said about the music player, at best it is functional, but could do with some colour to liven things up a bit.

Camera and Video Recording

The camera on the DEXT is a 5.0 Megapixel offering, with support for autofocus and geotagging. There is no flash on the camera, so anything captured indoors and in low level lighting conditions is going to suffer. Outside, pictures generally present well, and are certainly good enough for the main aim of the device. With a focus on social networking, most images captured on the DEXT camera are going to look good enough when uploaded to Twitter, Facebook or Flickr. The standard is acceptable enough, but not great. Images can be captured manually using the main camera key on the device, or automatically by touching the camera icon on the screen. If you rotate the device from landscape to portrait mode or vice versa, the onscreen icons also rotate round, which is a nice visual touch. When in camera mode, you can simply flip to camcorder and back via the main menu button – just a quick press of the menu key, select the imaging mode required, and the choice is activated, all pretty slick. The camera recording facility matches that of the stills camera, i.e. it is ok, and good enough for messing around with, loading up to the web and emailing off to friends, but you wouldn’t want to use it for more than that.

Web Browser and Connectivity

The native Android Web browser is a pretty decent browser, and manages to present most sites in an acceptable manner, and that is the case also with the Motorola DEXT. There is no multi touch support on this device, so zooming in to a web page is done via a plus/minus scroll bar which appears at the bottom of web pages when you start to swipe through the web page. Also at the bottom is a full screen option, which works like a mini map viewer; tapping this icon displays the page in full on the device, with a magnifying box that you can run down the small print. When you find the part of the page you want to read, just tap on the box to instantly zoom in. In practice it works well, but is not as intuitive as using a pinch zoom action. The DEXT supports WiFi 802.11 b/g, plus 3G+ Mobile Broadband, with HSDPA at up to 7.2Mbps for downloads. This is all backed up with Class 12 GPRS and EDGE, if you happen to be located outside a 3G coverage area. In testing data speeds on the device, we were restricted to using GPRS as the SIM card sent with the review model was not a 3G SIM. And you really notice the difference when browsing the web on GPRS! It is so easy to get used to the speeds offered by 3G and HSDPA, that using GPRS is torturous! But even under these trying conditions, the DEXT showed it is a more than competent web device.

Operating System

The Motorola DEXT still runs on Android OS 1.5, which in relative terms is now a rather old version of Android. This means no support for applications like Google’s gesture search, or Google Earth, or even apps like the Daily Strip, which offers cartoon strips like Peanuts and Garfield. This can be frustrating, but of the DEXT is your first step into the World of Android, you’re not really going to miss what you’ve never had. In practice, the device works well, there are still many thousands of apps available from the Android Market, and the implementation of MotoBLUR on the DEXT is done really well.

Summary

At the beginning, I said the DEXT is ordinary, standard, and even a bit frumpy. And I stand by that, in terms of look and design. But in use the DEXT is a fine handset, with a strong emphasis on social network integration, which it manages to deliver well enough. All round the DEXT performs, and whilst it may not take star billing in any one area, it is a more than capable jack of all trades, delivering well in all it does without being a star device. Even so, it is not a phone you would be embarrassed to use in front of your friends; in fact, thanks to the Android OS the DEXT is an adequate handset and would be an ideal choice for a first Android phone. If the choice is to either buy or avoid, I would definitely say the DEXT is a buy.