Motorola is on a roll with its Android-based smartphone launches. Hot on the heels of its Mobile World Congress announcements the Motorola Devour went on sale at Best Buy a few days ago for the bargain basement price of $99.
The same sleek all aluminium-bodied handset, exclusive to Verizon Wireless in the US, will cost $149 with a new 2-year contract (after a $100 mail-in rebate) when it launches at Verizon’s high street stores later this month.
The Devour is the second Motorola Android handset available through Verizon and the first to feature Motorola’s excellent Motoblur user interface designed to make it easier to manage and access contacts and personal email with posts, messages and photos from popular social networking services including Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
I have been using the Devour now for a few days and have also been impressed with its sleek industrial-style design and overall build quality and the tight integration of the preloaded bundle of Google apps which include Google Maps Navigation. (Verizon also pre-loads its own VZ Navigator app.)
In hardware terms, the Devour ticks most, but not all, of the right boxes. It comes with a 3.1-inch capacitive touch screen – though sadly multi-touch gestures are not supported – a 3Mp digital camera with video capture, one-touch playback and easy uploading to YouTube and a standard 3.5mm audio jack.Connectivity options include Bluetooth, Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g) and aGPS (assisted GPS.)
Like the Motorola Droid, the screen slides smoothly out of the way to reveal a mini-Qwerty keyboard that is reasonably comfortable to use. In a nice design touch, the keyboard is actually recessed a fraction to allow the screen to slide smoothly over it.
Despite its solid feel, the Devour is actually almost exactly the same size (4.4 inches long by 2.4 inches wide by 0.6 inch deep) and weight (5.89 ounces) as the Droid but looks quite different because of the Droid’s black case and larger screen - which I quickly found myself missing.
The other disappointment is that the Devour runs Android 1.6 (Donut) rather than the latest 2.0 version, but overall the Devour is a worthy addition to the Motorola Android stable.
Personally however, I am waiting for HTC’s Desire which was announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a few weeks ago and is basically an enhanced version of the Nexus One with HTC’s Sense user interface.
