Moto Fire

1:50 PM Posted by Kine master

Moto's back- with Gingerbread

After a period of relative quiet, Motorola has

marked its return to the Indian smartphone market

with its first Andriod Gingerbread phones in the

country, of which the fire is one. And it certainly has

us intersted, for it is the first Gingerbread handset to

offer a touch and type form factor in the country at a

price below Rs 10,000. The handset does not have

an earth shattering design but will appeal to people

who are looking for a candybar handset with a full

QWERTY keypad. Overall build quality is good and

the phone is comfortable to hold. That said, the

glossy back cover is a finger-print magnet, and

needs constant cleaning. The Motorola Fire gives

users the best of both touch and type worlds with its

combination of a 2.8 inch QVGA touchscreen and

full QWERTY keypad. The touchscreen is sensitive
and large for this kind of form factor, but we found

the QWERTY keyboard to be a bit cramped, and

would not recommend it for those who like to write

really long texts and e-mails, although we guess

one could get used to it with time. Unlike the

QWERTY keyboards seen in Nokia and BlackBerry

devices which generally have numbers epread

across three rows, the one on the Motorola fire has

all the number keys doubled up in the very first row.

There are no physical buttons to make or end calls.

All this takes some time getting used to, especially if

you are moving from another QWERTY device.

multimedia fire

On the music front, the handset comes pre-loaded

with a music application, which plays most of the

popular audio formats such as

AAC,MP3,WMP,WAP,WAV and MIDI. The sound

quality of the audio through the earphones and the

speaker was very good. The phone also comes with

FM radio. The FM reception for the handset was

good but the voice quality on the speakerphone left

a bit to be desired. From the video perspective,

there was no pre-installed application for playing

video, but this being an Andriod phone, one could

always go to the Android Market and download a

player for the purpose. However, even without a

dedicated video application, the handset was able to

play videos in MP4 and 3GP formats. On the flip

side, the display's low resolution of 320 x 240 meant

that viewing video was not exactly an enthralling

experience. Moving on to the camera, the Motorola

Fire comes with a 3.0 MP camera. It is a fixed focus

camera sans flash. The image quality of pictures

taken through this handset was average and futher

deteriorated in low light conditions. Interstingly, the

handset is powered by a 600 MHz processor, which

might seem to be a bit on the lower side in terms of

clock speed but when compared with other handset

running on Gingerbread, it nevertheless performed

ably most of the time. Although it did show some

signs of lag when put under heavy multi-tasking

pressure. The device has no front facing camera,

ruling out video calls.

Doing the basics very well

   One of the most interesting features of Motorola

Fire is that it runs on Andriod 2.3 Gingerbread,

which is the latest Andriod OS, and is slowly making

its way on to handset. Motorola has not attempted to

add too many enhancements to the basic interface.

There are five home screens that one can

personalise but, was no provision for adding or

deleting home screens. However, the Fire comes

with a Mode Switch option that lets you customise

these home screens according to themes like

default mode, business mode, entertainment mode

and personal mode. Setting up Gmail account on

this handset was very easy and once done, it

synced all our contact and Picasa photos like in any

other Andriod handset. You could also set up a Wi-

Fi hotspot, and thanks to the relatively larger

screen, we did not have any complaints on the

social networking and Web browsing front - we think

2.8 inch is the perfect screen size for such devices.

This handset comes with a 1420 mAh battery, which

easily last a day with bit about two hours of voice

calls. All of which makes the Motorola Fire a

handset worth considering for consumers who are

looking for a sub- Rs 10,000 mobile running on

Andriod Gingerbread with a touch and type form

factor.

Display

            TFT capacitive touchscreen
            240 x 320 pixels, 2.8 inches
            QWERTY keyboard
            Proximity sensor for auto turn-off
            Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate

Size

           110 g Weight
           116.5 x 58 x 13.5 mm

Memory

            Unlimited entries,Caller groups
            Unlimited Call records
            256 MB RAM, 512 MB ROM
            microSD, up to 32GB


Messaging

             SMS,MMS,

E-mail

              Yes

Connectivity

               Bluetooth 2.1,EDR
               Wi-Fi 802.11 b, g,n
               USB 2.0
               Computer sync, OTA sync
                3 G HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 384 Kbps

Camera

                 3MP, 2048 x 1536 pixels
                 Video 480p (24 fps)

Multimedia

                  FM Radio
                  Youtube Player

Features

                  Andriod OS, v2.3.4(Gingerbread)
                 600 MHz ARM 11 processor, Adreno 200

                GPU, Qualcomm MSM7227-1 chipset
                 Games
                 GPS with A-GPS support
                 Java,via Java MIDP emulator

              Google Search,Maps,Gmail,Google Talk
                 Picasa
Browser

                  WAP 2.0/xHTML,HTTML
Battery

                   8 hours (3 G) Talk time
                   720 hours Stand-by time
                   1420mAh Capacity