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Motorola Citrus (Verizon Wireless) hands-on overview

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Motorola Citrus measures 4.1.2.3 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighing 3.9 ounces. It is made of ROUGH-feeling plastic that adjusts badly around the edges; Motorola's usual high building quality is nowhere exists. 3-inch glass capacitive screen has only 240 by 320 pixels resolution. It is fine for feature phones, but it is terrible for Android, as this makes screens feel cramped and renders some third-party apps unusable. Citrus include Flip, Motorola's ill-considered, rear-mounted trackpad, is difficult to use accurately and scroll the screen by an accident all the time, as you hold the phone. Is the first I do when I get a phone with flip test to see if it has improved — as it never does not — and then deactivate it.

This is not a good texting cell phone. The on-screen keyboard has a QWERTY format in both portrait or landscape mode. But even in landscape format, typing was pure frustration. There was a noticeable delay after each key the tap and the Citrus lost many ovntapningen totally, even when I slowed down, my writing down on a near crawl. I have not done this many errors on a text in the latest mobile phone memory.

Motorola Citrus is a dual band EV-DO Rev 0 (850/1900 MHz) unit with 802 .11b/g Wi-Fi. Citrus delaying Verizons reputation for excellent voice quality. The voice was warm and full in the earpiece, with no background hiss. On the other side said dial-up computer resides, sounded noticeably better on this handset than on a LG octane and Pantech kernel I had on hand for comparison purposes. Call sounded fine Aliph Jawbone icon through a ($ 99), (4 stars) Bluetooth headset. Nuance-powered voice dialing worked fine via Bluetooth; always a nice surprise on an Android phone. The speakerphone sounded tinny but went strongly enough for outdoor use. Battery life was stellar 7 hours and 36 minutes of speaking time.

UI, Apps and Messaging
Motorola seems to have logged out of a row budget Android devices as Flipout, charm and Citrus without notice or care about how poorly Android gets together with QVGA screens. Android 2.1 is compatible with almost all 100,000 + third-party apps in the Android market. But Citrus, large number of apps simply does not appear in the Android market (including our benchmark suite, for example). It is a problem throughout the device's UI, which makes common tasks as adding Bluetooth devices and change the settings for more difficult than they need to be. Web page fonts look blurred. Time and length of recent calls history both get chopped off. It all looks terrible.

While moving past the display issues, there were errors. Once, I took the handset and unlocked it only to be met with mainly black screen with the title "alert messages". It is all; It was frozen. My first attempt at pairing a set Motorola S9-HD ($ 129, 3.5 stars) Bluetooth headphones crashed Citrus that requires a restart. Often the main menu was fixed; scrolling was jerky and even impossible on numerous occasions in 10 to 15 seconds at a time. Gallery photo and video was a messy, not responding to the root. 528 MHz processor is pretty basic, but it should have been OK if the monitor's low number of pixels. The phone works only badly programmed.

Just like on the Samsung Fascinate and similar phones have Verizon completely removed Citrus ' default Google search and replaced it with Bing search — OK, but not as good as Google. If you're looking for Google Maps and Navigation, you can still retrieve them from the Android market.

Buried somewhere in all this, is that Citrus a normal Android device with a good WebKit browser and powerful e-mail options. But at this point, who cares?

Multimedia, camera and conclusions
Standard-size 3.5 mm headphone jack makes to find good-sounding pipes ear easily. My 32 GB SanDisk card worked fine in microSD slot below the battery cover. But drag the cover was an exercise in frustration and broken nails. Use double Twist (free), (4 stars), and synchronize your media via USB with this one. There is also a 170 MB free internal memory. MP3 and AAC tracks sounded clear and full of Motorola S9-HD Bluetooth headphones. Standalone MP4 and WMV video files play smoothly in full screen mode provided they were coded to the phone's 320 by 240 pixels landscape solution. The music player album art displayed less than other Android phones and video player required some extra screen taps, but it all worked OK.

3-megapixel camera has no autofocus or flash. I needed a small, flat screwdriver to get the protective plastic film off of sunken camera lens; someone goofed in the manufacturing industry. Test images were clear, crisp and colorful with a moderate amount of grain in weaker rooms. Recorded at 288 pixels 352 videos maxed out at 16 frames per second. they saw surprisingly clear and vibrant, if too small.

In the event of it not yet clear, please purchase not Citrus. The $ 49 LG Optimus S (4 stars) on Sprint and free LG Optimus T (4 stars) on T-Mobile is far, far better budget Android devices. We will review the Verizon's LG Vortex (which is basically Optimus V) and Metropcs's Optimus M fairly soon, and we are pretty sure they will also be a good idea. Finally, the LG ally ($ 49, 3.5 stars) are large and clumsy, but its slide-out QWERTY keyboard is well-suited for frequent texters and senders and its higher screen resolution makes it a better candidate for installing apps.


You can download Motorola Citrus manual User Guide click here

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