Hands-on With the Motorola Devour (Verizon Wireless)

Motorola’s second Android device for Verizon has landed at the Techland offices. Say hello to the Devour. It will be available in Verizon stores for $149.99 after a $100MIR in mid-March. However, Best Buy will begin selling the device this Thursday. Price is currently TBD, but I don’t see it being much different, if it all, from the official Verizon pricing. According to the Best Buy Facebook page, the Devour will retail for $99.

Features

• 3.1-inch HVGA capacitive touch-screen, 320×480
• ~700MHz processor
• Android v1.6 with MotoBlur
• Google Maps Nav
• Adobe Flash Lite
• 3.5mm headphone jack
• 3-megapixel camera w 3x digital zoom (no flash)
• Full QWERTY keyboard
• 802.11b/g
• Bluetooth 2+EDR
• Two-piece aluminum casing

Initial impressions

Motorola has gone back to the industrial motif with the Devour, much like they did on the Droid, but I’m not entirely sure that it really works for me. The two-piece aluminum casing is nice, but there’s a lot of empty space, too. Slide the screen out and you’ll find a 4-row keyboard3-row keyboard instead of the standardish 4-row found on most every full QWERTY devices. It’s a breeze to type on but reserve a few minutes to adjust to its layout.

The camera is blazingly fast from start to finish, but there’s no flash. The optical trackpad seems a bit redundant on a touch-screen device, but it comes in handy when going through massive amounts of text. Speaking of which, the screen is rather small considering the overall size of the Devour. Take a look at the area below the screen where the three haptic touch-sensitive icons reside. Seems like a lot of wasted space. Oh, there’s an LED for notifications above the optical trackpad in case you were wondering what that slot was allotted for.

It’s an interesting design. If there’s anything you’d like us to check out over the next week or so, feel free to leave a comment.

Related Topics: android, devour, motorola, Gadgets, Smartphones, Verizon
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  • midpipps

    Why would they run version 1.6 that just seems a little odd to me. Although I must say the keyboard does look nicer then the one on the droid.

  • http://artsproul.wordpress.com artsproul

    The keyboard looks great, and is well sized for men (target audience). It should also be noted that the device has 4 rows and not 3 as identified in the article.

  • http://twitter.com/thepeterha Peter Ha

    ROFL. It does have 4. I clearly can’t count but the layout isn’t the standard layout you find on other QWERTY devices.

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