Motorola Fire XT Review

Other than the Defy, Motorola doesn’t really have a good Android phone in the Indian market, which is why other companies like Samsung and HTC have completely taken over, with Nokia still hanging in there of course. The company has recently launched two budget droids in the market hoping to re-capture some of the market share. Let’s take the Fire XT for a test drive and see if it’s worth your while. 

On video: Motorola Fire XT

Curvy design gives it a good look

The screen resolution is just 320x480 which is low for this size. Along with the proximity sensor, we also have a ambient light sensor placed next to the earpiece. The memory is expandable up to 32GB and the XT supports hot-swap. We noticed the screen tends to get greasy very easily so you’ll have to keep wiping it constantly. Overall, at 114g, the Fire XT is reasonably light weight and looks presentable as well. The only niggle we have here is with the physical buttons on the device which could have been raised a little more for a better feel.

Features
Interface
The Fire XT is powered by an 800MHz Qualcomm processor and runs Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread. Despite this, the interface feels quite laggy and unresponsive. This is very evident when swiping through the home screens. The phone features MotoSwitch UI, which is a lightly skinned version of the stock interface. One handy feature is the ability to group apps according to various genres. Creating new groups is fairly simple and straight forward and you can organise your apps a lot better. Motorola haven’t modified the notification bar so you don’t get any toggle switches here. You can choose between the standard Android keyboard or Motorola’s own version, which is quite bad so we recommend sticking with the default. Swype is also present if you choose to use it. Inputting text cannot be done quickly as there’s a significant lag between each key press which makes it a painful experience.

Group apps based on genre or your usage needs

The biggest issue we faced was with the quality of the screen itself which was horrible. Not only are the colours muted and pale, it doesn’t seem like it supports a wide colour gamut and there’s very noticeable banding in wallpapers. Ghosting is also a big problem which is evident when you try to move icons around. Scrolling through the settings causes the text to streak and distort quite badly, in fact the light blue text turns navy blue when you scroll up or down. Messing up the screen on a touchscreen phone is like messing up the steering in a car, it just ruins the whole experience.

Media
Motorola has borrowed the music player from TuneWiki and customised the look of it. Thanks to this, the audio quality is a lot better with decent earphones and the player will automatically download the lyrics of the song. You can even create play-lists and see what songs are trending around the globe. The format support is still limited to MP3s, WAV and AAC+ though.

Integrating TuneWiki was a brilliant idea

The video player is a plain old stock Android player and supports MP4, H.263, H.264 and WMV. SD videos play just fine but due to the poor screen quality, you won’t be really enjoying anything. Even in animated flicks, the picture is quite dull and the colours are muted. Finally, we also have FM Radio support.