Introduction

Its main screen has five panels that a person can flip through to check on and type in social networking updates and other messages instantly.

Users can also take photos and then share them on MySpace, Photobucket, Facebook or Picasa. Or they can check email accounts, text messages and social networking messages separately or in one universal inbox.

All of this integration may conjure an image of a compact, waste-no-space phone. But, unfortunately, that's not what the phone's designers envisioned.

The Devour is bulky, boxy, and leaves extra room on the keypad's sides for seemingly no reason. Its 3.0-megapixel camera takes good images, but has few options for altering them. And although the Android Market offers numerous applications, finding fun for free on the phone can be a challenge.

Design

Three things likely to catch a person's eye when seeing the Devour for the first time: its size, its sliding face, and its color. The silver exterior looks bold and futuristic, but it's also boxy and looks outdated.

The front face contains the 3.1-inch screen, which is a decent size for a smartphone, but not nearly large enough to justify its hulking frame. That is the result of the built-in slider mechanism.

The Devour has a single touch screen feature, which is the ability to flirt between displays by moving a finger left or right across the screen. With such a large screen, it's surprising there aren't more touch screen capabilities.

It has buttons to turn on the camera, adjust the volume, and activate voice commands on the right side, and a battery, microSD card compartment and a micro-USB connector on the left side. A 3.5 mm headset jack is located at the top of the phone and the 3.0-megapixel camera lens is on the back.

The full QWERTY keyboard slides out horizontally from under the screen, with thick edges of the underside of the phone exposed on either side of the phone so the screen is shorter in length than the keypad.

This may have seemed like an innovative way for the phone's designers to make the Devour look different, but it really just takes up space that could have been eliminated. The keyboard and its buttons are no bigger for having this style of slider, and neither is the screen, so it's hard to see a benefit to this design. After a lot of typing, the raised edges on either side of the keyboard could even get in the way and become annoying.

But it has the advantage of listing numbers and letters separately, however, having the symbol and capitalization key separate would be nice, too.

The Devour has the advantage of a large screen and a full QWERTY keypad, but the horizontal sliding design is made in a way that takes up space that the phone would be better off shaving from its exterior. And with such a large screen, it wouldn't have hurt to add some more ouch screen features and make some buttons on the phone's face smaller.

Out of the box, the Motorola Devour comes with a standard battery, charger, a built-in 8GB microSD memory card, a quick reference guide and a product safety and warranty brochure.

Next >

This article is Copyright 2002-2012 Mobiledia Corp. and the review in part or in whole may NOT be reproduced in any electronic or printed medium without prior permission from Mobiledia. For information on reproducing any part of this review (or any images) please contact us.