Motorola Dext

This took me a little while, and seeing as I have just purchased this phone I thought I’d review it.

Motorola hopes an upcoming raft of Android handsets will breathe new life into the cooling corpse of its mobile phones efforts. The company has made a promising start with the Motorola Dext.

The Dext smart phone is no beauty, but it does what it says on the tin, providing a solid Android experience, with some handy social-networking extras, packed up with a full Qwerty keyboard. It has some flaws, like widgets that can’t quite get their act together and iffy call quality, but a snappy touchscreen and powerful operating system more than make up for those.

It’s all a Motoblur
The Dext is a slider phone with a Qwerty keyboard tucked underneath a 3.1-inch capacitive touchscreen. It’s the first Qwerty-keyboard-toting Android phone to emerge since the T-Mobile G1, made by HTC, and it aims to tempt the social-networking massive. To that end, Motorola’s tweaked version of Android, Motoblur, provides some extra features to help bring your contacts together.

For example, sign into your Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm and MySpace accounts, and the Dext will grab all your contacts, including their profile photos, and merge them with your Google account to fill up the phone’s address book. I found that it did a great job of linking contacts across accounts, and it was ace to be able to sort my contacts by name or recent updates. I miss, however, a few of the simpler tweaks that make an address book easy to use. For example, when I had a contact with a company name and no personal name, the Dext listed it by phone number. That could be a real pain for business users.

Once you’ve given the Dext all of your account information, you can update your status in Facebook and tweet at the same time, as well as send messages to your contacts in any one of umpteen ways. Motorola has also created some widgets that display your social whirl on the home screen: you can see your status, your messages — including direct tweets, Facebook messages, emails and texts — and ‘happenings’ (a stream of all your contacts’ recent posts).

It’s all a big bundle of fun, if you’re into that kind of thing like I am, and it’s helpful if you don’t like to have to check your various networks separately. The widgets are fine but we’d have liked more room for the text, and we found the happenings sometimes strayed out of the correct chronological order.

As well as the social-networking gubbins, Motoblur also includes an online service. It’s similar to Apple’s MobileMe and Nokia’s Ovi, not to mention a host of other offerings, providing a Web-based service that backs up your accounts and messages over the air. You can also track your phone by its GPS signal, and, if it’s not somewhere you think you can find it, like your house or your local boozer, you can wipe it remotely too.

Android adventure
Other than the messaging and address-book tweaks, Motorola has left most of the Android user interface alone. That means there’s no multi-touch support, so you can’t zoom into photos or Web pages with a pinch of your fingers.

The Dext has access to the wonderful Android Market, which makes zillions of apps easy to find and install. That means the Dext has huge potential for growth, whether you’re exploiting the infinite jukebox of Spotify (I quite like this) or turning it into a Skype phone. Many of the apps are free and although they don’t tend to be quite as slick as the apps available for the iPhone, the Android Market wins points for giving its developers more scope for creativity.

As well as its Android goodness, the Dext has solid specs, with a 5-megapixel camera(WOOHOO!), Wi-Fi (Yay!) and HSDPA for fast downloads over 3G. It comes with a 2GB memory card (it supports cards of up to 32GB) and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack so you can listen to your tunes on your own cans.

Real or virtual keyboard?
The Dext’s physical keyboard is a mixed bag. The keys are large and raised, but there’s no space between them. Still, it’s impressive that Motorola has packed them into a small space without sacrificing too much usability, and I have no trouble typing emails and texts accurately. There’s also a fairly good on-screen keyboard.

In general, I prefer to type on the physical keyboard, even though it can be a pain, because you’re forced to flip from portrait orientation to landscape when you pop it open. In some cases, that means I’m stuck to the on-screen keyboard when typing a quick missive on a screen that looked better in portrait orientation, such as a Web page.

Ugly duckling
With the power of Android, a peppy touchscreen and some fun social-networking features, there’s only one big drawback that keeps me from loving the Dext forever: its frumpy appearance. It’s a surprise that Motorola, which is known for producing sexy phones like the Razr, took a major design cue for the Dext from the lumpen Nokia N97. It’s rather chunky, with a dull chrome trim over boring black plastic, and the white labels for the buttons on the side look like temporary stickers that should peel off but don’t.

Conclusion
If you’re drowning in a social-networking deluge of updates and messages, the Motorola Dext may be the answer for keeping everything under control. Throw in a full Qwerty keyboard, you’ve got an excellent phone that’s built for staying in touch, as long as you don’t actually want to make a lot calls.

A good-looking, responsive touchscreen and the powerful, expandable Android operating system help to make up for the Dext’s uninspiring looks and slightly questionable build quality, making for a well-rounded smart phone that you’d be happy to be caught typing on.