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Android smartphones have flooded the smartphone industry and it has taken a strong foothold of the market too. However, you don’t see that many Android smartphones that have a portrait QWERTY design like what we are used to seeing with Blackberry phones. However, Motorola has decided to change that and has come out with the Motorola PRO+- an Android phone that has a QWERTY keyboard on the front. It is definitely aimed at business professionals but those who don’t quite like virtual keyboards will surely hit it off with this one as well. So let’s see what this phone is good for.
Design Right below that screen sit the four capacitive Android buttons that have become a trademark with Android phone these days. Looking at the buttons and ports on this phone, we have the power key and the standard audio jack on the top side of the phone. Meanwhile, on the left is the microUSB port. Finally on the right is the volume rocker which we find to be well designed as it is easily distinguishable from the chassis even without having to look at it. The QWERTY keyboard on the front might take some getting used to, but that doesn’t take too long. After using it for a few days, you will start enjoying sending texts with this phone although you might need the help of both hands to do that as the keys aren’t shaped for single hand use. Finally, on the back of the Motorola PRO+ is the 5MP camera which we will talk about more a little later. Features Android v2.3.5 Gingerbread is the OS of choice for this phone and there is a custom interface that runs over it. As most other phones, Motorola PRO+ also offers seven customizable homescreens and each dock have four icons. From these icons, you can actually decide what you would like to do with three of them and the last one is left out for the app drawer. Although there is a QWERTY keyboard that most of you might like to use, for other times, you can also use the on-screen virtual keyboard. The keyboard is made available to you when you are using the Motorola PRO+ in landscape mode. The physical keyboard will be the way to go when you want to type long emails, but when you are using an app in landscape mode and just have to key in a few words, the virtual keyboard will come in handy. It also has an auto-correct feature that we really liked as it worked well. The Motorola PRO+ comes with many widgets preinstalled and it covers all the basics like weather information, email and of course social networking. One of the apps we found pretty nifty was the 7digital music marketplace which can be used to buy music straight from the smartphone. If you are a fan of Kies Air that comes with Samsung phones, well then you might like the Phone Portal app that Motorola provides with this phone as it lets you manage your device over Wi-Fi. The social networking hub is also great in tackling all your social networking updates. Finally, Quickoffice is definitely one very useful app to have especially for those business users who want to get some work done on the fly.
On the front of the phone is the 3.1 inch screen which sports a resolution of 480 x 640 pixels. The screen on the Motorola PRO is quite bright so you won’t have any trouble using it under the sun. We also got colors that looked natural plus the black tones were amazing too. Thanks to the 258ppi pixel density, details are amazing. However, it does have poor viewing angles. So moving on to the back of the phone, we see the 5MP camera on the Motorola PRO+ which comes with LED flash too. The pictures taken on a sunny day were ok as there was a lot of detail to be found in the pictures with minimal digital noise too. However, colors look washed out as the camera does overexpose pictures at times. When we moved indoors, pictures took a turn for the bad as the camera struggled to focus on objects. Moving on to video, it records videos at 720p and the videos were not too bad. Web browsing on the Motorola PRO+ was a little disappointing even though it was using the Android stock browser. This is because navigation functions like zooming and panning seemed to lag quite a bit. Although it supports Flash, you might want to keep it off as it seriously affects your browser’s performance. In terms of connectivity options, we have the usual stuff like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and FM radio. Motorola PRO+ does a decent job in terms of performance as we can hear our friends clearly on our end. Meanwhile, they had no trouble hearing us as well as there is a secondary microphone to get rid of all the background noise. Meanwhile, the phone is rated to give 8 hours of talk time which is not too bad.
Pros and Cons The internet experience was not too good as the browser was a major downer. The 5MP camera could have been better too.
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