Motorola Charm Preview: First Look

Motorola Charm Preview: First Look
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Motorola Charm Preview

Motorola has been one of the greatest Android proponents along with HTC. Ever since Sanjay Jha took over the reins as CEO of Motorola, Motorola has been quick to dump all its loss making product lines and has wholeheartedly made the switch to Android, a decision which seems very wise with hindsight. Motorola’s Android success story started with the hugely popular Motorola Droid. The best Android smartphone currently is undoubtedly the <strong>Motorola Droid X</strong>. It is clearly a major player in the Android arena.

Motorola just announced the new Motorola Charm which is a budget smartphone with a QWERTY keypad. It is targeted at active social network users and heavy texters.

Design

The Motorola Charm has dimensions of 67.2 x 98.4 x 11.4 mm and weighs around 110 gms. It’s a bit bulky due to the wide keyboard.

It comes with a 2.8 inch TFT capacitive touchscreen display which has a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, a non standard resolution which means that some Android apps will not work on it. It has a tough Gorilla Glass display which offers maximum protection.

User Interface

The Motorola Charm will be powered by Android 2.1 Eclair and the MotoBLUR UI v1.5. Many of the hardware details aren’t out yet, but it will have 512 MB internal memory and will support up to 32 GB microSD cards. The MotoBLUR UI has Twitter, Facebook and Myspace integration for easy access to status updates.

Below the display it has three touch sensitive keys: Menu, Home and Back. It also has a Backtrack navigation pad for browsing through the UI like the Motorola Backflip.

Multimedia

The Charm has a 3.15 MP camera which can take shots at a resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. It comes with geotagging support. It also comes with a stereo FM radio with RDS.

The 2.8 inch display should be good enough for watching short video clips and YouTube videos.

It comes with the basic Android music and video player which can handle MP3, AAC, eAAC+,WMA and the 3GP and MP4 files respectively.

Connectivity

The Motorola Charm has the standard list of connectivity options: GPRS, EDGE, 3G HSDPA, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n. It also has Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 connectivity. It also has a built in GPS receiver with A-GPS and Google Maps. It sports the standard Webkit browser which is one of the best mobile web browsers. Other browser and chat applications can be downloaded from the Android Market.

Conclusion

It is a very interesting option for new users: the first candybar QWERTY phone running Android. It should do well with the younger crowd who are hooked on text messages and social networking. The hardware details haven’t been released yet, but it will presumably have a 600-800 MHz processor and around 256 MB of RAM which makes it an unlikely candidate for an upgrade to Android 2.2 Froyo. Nevertheless, it looks like a great phone.

Check out our list of <strong>Top 10 Android Smartphones</strong> before you go ahead and buy a new Android phone.

Also check out the <strong>Nokia E5 Preview</strong>: It’s a Symbian smartphone in the same price range offering better features than the Motorola Charm.