Latest Phones - The Motorola CHARM, A Review

Latest Motorola Phones - The CHARM

As mentioned in the previous article (Motorola BackFlip Review) the mobile giant is now into some serious competition with others. That phone was more likely to be competing against iPhone and the Google Nexus One but this unit the "Charm" is looking more likely a Blackberry device. And except the keypad the front interface looks a bit like the LG Remarq Turquoise With a roomy keyboard and a gorgeous looking display at the front are among the main features of this device. Let's have a look at how the hardware stands...



OK let's start with the length which is about 98cm, width 62 + the depth is around 11.4cm. Including the battery it weights about 110grams. There are only two color choices available but as the time goes on we'll see many third party skins also come in to life. Anyway the display has a 320x240 resolution in pixels. The total size is 2.8". Although it certainly big in comparison with other models still when analyzing it did lack some brightness and sharp enhancements.

The camera is a decent one but not a excellent in today's standards. The 3MPX can capture images in some high resolutions but again for some reason some basic features like brightness, etc were not that good. But the overall quality of the colors were pretty decent. And if you're interested in taking some serious pictures then you should check out the Sony Ericsson Vivaz which has a 12MP (12.1 to be exact) monstrous camera which can take HD standards both video and images. Anyway it also has LED flash and autofucus functions.

The keyboard is pretty good and because of the larger width has enabled them to include a bigger keys + camera and some other controlling buttons also. It has 3G, HSDPA (with a maximum speed of 3.6Mbps) and surprisingly WiFi also (after considering the low price). USB and Bluetooth is also included. Both audio and video capabilities were also impressive. By default it can playback man popular formats such as MP3, AAC, eAAC, WMV, MPEG-4, H.264/3, WMA, AMR. 

The operating system is Andriod 2.1 and since they released the latest 2.2 version it should be available by now. The overall usability concerning the user friendliness was also very good. In the home screen there are few widgets available and can add and remove more according to the needs of the user. It comes with a 2GB of microSD card and can be upgraded up to 32GB in the future.

The quality of the calls were also pretty decent even though it did picked up few noises it's not a huge issue here. Youtube and many other flv files including the Web pages were loaded without much of a hassle. The web browser was also pretty robust thanks to the Android OS.

The phone battery can give around 5 hours of continuous talk time and almost 14 days of standby time. This may not be one of the best latest phones concerning especially the capturing device but, if you can just ignore the 3MP camera, when considering the asking price the Motorola CHARM is certainly a pretty good device.