Motorola Debut i865 – The Basic Multimedia Phone

Sum n substance:

Thumbs up: Good call quality, deceent music player, nice sleek design.

Thumbs down: The keypad design is not that great, the display resolution is low.

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: iDen phones are known for being bulky and most of the times they are either in the clamshell form or the candy bar form factor. However with this one Motorola has attempted to change the trend and has moved towards the slider form factor. This one is being offered by Boost mobile and is available for $170 without the contract. Anyways let’s move ahead and see what this Moto child has to offer.

This one sort of reminded me of the Moto Rizr , maybe its just because of the slider form factor. Anyways this one measures a decent  4.19 inches long by 2.0 inches wide by 0.59 inch thick and is pretty much sleek. At 2.99 ounces this one aint even all that clunky. Its thin enough to fit into the front or back pocket.

Its got a 2.2 inch display which supports around 65,536 colors and has a 176×220 pixel resolution. This isn’t surprising because most of the slider phones don’t offer much in terms of resolution. Because of this the images appear to be a bit blocky and unattractive.

Below the screen is an array of shortcuts which can support around 9 user defined applications.

Right below the screen there is a navigation toggle, two soft keys, menu key, music key and the talk and end keys. The middle three keys of the navigation toggle light up when a slideshow or any track is being played and play the role of next track, play/pause and previous track keys. However the navigation keys felt a bit to cushiony which isn’t something anyone would like.

Sliding the phone reveals the keypad. The keys are well spaced out and roomy. The keys are a bit raised up because of which it gives a nice feel to the fingers. Though, those who don’t like the spongy kind of keys would not really like these ones.

The left spine houses the speakerphone key, the volume rocker, a large push-to-talk key, and the charger jack. Its got a 3.5 millimeter headset jack which is a nice feature for a phone with a music player. At the back of the phone there is the camera lens, though the phone has to be slided to click pictures. This one again has the Micro SD slot located behind the battery cover.

Its got a 600 entry phonebook  with room for a total of 8 phone numbers, 2 email addresses and an IP address. The other basic features that it includes are the vibrate mode, calculator, alarm clock, voice recorder and a datebook.  The other advanced features include multimedia messaging, a wireless web browser, stereo Bluetooth and GPS.

The music player offered by this one is pretty good. It categorises songs according to the artists, albums, genres and also provides support for podcasts. Its got three different visualisers  and around thirteen 3D reverb effects. However the user  will have to switch over to the headphones to get an exact feel of the reverb effects.

Its got a 1.3 megapixel camera which supports taking pictures in almost 6 resolutions. This one also brings along the geo tagging feature with it. The photos can be either stored in the 70 MB of inbuilt memory which is available or else the external memory can be spruced upto 8GB. The photo quality is decent enough for a 1.3 megapixel camera and. The pictures were bright and lively though the video quality wasn’t all that great. The videos appeared to be quite grainy most of the times.

I was pretty much impressed with the call quality. There was hardly any interference and static or echo. Also the speakerphone was pretty loud enough except for a few crowded places. Most of the callers could not make out that I was using a cell phones. There were hardly any complaints even on the side of the callers.

This one has a battery life of 3.4 hours talktime and 3.95 days on standby.

Nitty-Gritty: This one is definitely for all those who are looking out for a nice decent multimedia phone. Though there are a few design quirks here and there, this one could easily survive on the basis of its performance and features.

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