Motorola Devour Verizon Wireless Review – a Cannibal at Best
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010Will the Motorola Devour be as successful as the DROID? Motorola’s first Android cell phone, the Motorola DROID for Verizon Wireless had some success garnering Time Magazine’s Gadget of the Year award with its much anticipated and much heralded recent Android release on Verizon Wireless. The Droid by Motorola apparently does, did, and is still doing many things including contributing to Lucasfilm Ltd’s coffers due to its extended familial relations to R2-D2 and C-3PO (Seriously). But it seems as though it won’t be too long before the Droid will have a little competition coming its way from what appears to be Motorola’s most virile enemy of late – Motorola.
Aptly named the Motorola Devour – It’s hard to imagine exactly what is planned for this aluminum clad slider cell phone. I do have to give credit to Motorola when it comes to design – the Devour is a beautiful. The Devour definitely took some notes from its predecessor- improving on the Droid’s sliding mechanism, microSD card accessibility (unique side access for it and the battery), and even enough clearance to actually use your thumbs on the top row of letters (P’s and Q’s be wary). However, Motorola is adding to the Devour a feature that was left off of the DROID and that’s the MotoBlur, the company’s social media user interface, which may handicap the Devour and keep it from achieving much of the success of its sibling the DROID. All of this positive comes to an end with a single word that’s not actually a word: Motoblur. Apparently unshaken by its last attempt to bind its proprietary user interface with Android in the poorly executed and highly unusable Motorola Cliq; Motorola is once again hijacking a proven, functional, and well-liked operating system and tacking on its own UI. I haven’t used it yet, but I’m a little skeptical judging by my recent experience with the Palm Pixi (working with the same Qualcomm MSM7627 chip); It’s easy to envision an overtaxed processor (Qualcomm MSM7627 chip) and resultant interface lag. But back to my point how does Motorola plan to follow up the success of the DROID with Devour when the device only has a 3-megapixel camera, a smaller display, and will only run Android 1.6 (the DROID ran Android 2.0)? Will Devour’s sleek design make up for the lack of more robust features? – assuming you’re overlooking the Motoblur, the lower resolution camera, the smaller display, the slower processor, the out of date Android OS (running on 1.6 at release) and the fact that all of these apparent issues could be easily resolved just by purchasing the very similarly priced Droid.
Assuming the public is entirely transfixed by the Motorola Devour- what has Motorola to gain? It essentially comes down to undermining their one successful cell phone entry since the Motorola Razr dynasty with the same form factor, similar OS on the same network – what market segment is Motorola cornering with the Devour that it didn’t already have with the Droid? That all depends on what is more important to consumers: form or features. We shall see.
Scott Price is a Site Merchandiser with LetsTalk.com