Motorola Fire XT Review

Web pages take their time to load

The phone also gets warm very quickly and it rebooted twice on me, once when I was trying to use Google Maps and the second time, I wasn’t even using the phone when it happened. Onboard memory is very less so a microSD card is a must. The screen of our review unit had a row of dead pixels which is noticeable when you use the phone in landscape mode (see above pic), more evidence leading to the poor quality of the screen.

Misc. Features
Some extra apps bundled by Motorola include MotoLounge which doesn’t exactly work in India since it’s region specific. Mode Switch lets you change the theme of the phone and depending on what you choose, the layout and widgets on the home screen change with it just like HTC’s Scene modes. Lastly, we have Qik Video pre-bundled as well, which lets you video chat, video mail and video share.

Camera
The 5MP shooter has autofocus but the sensor isn’t able to capture a lot of detail. A single LED flash is present to help you with low light but it doesn’t always work well. The camera interface is the stock Gingerbread which gives you standard customization options like Exposure, White Balance, etc. The front-facing camera can be used for portrait stills of video calling through an app.

Picture quality is strictly average

Video recording is limited to only 480p resolution which is what’s expected from a 800MHz CPU. The quality of the recording is strictly average with quite a bit of noise in indoor clips.

Battery Life
A 1540mAh on a 3.5-inch screen with a low pixel count can only be a good thing. Our video drain test gave us an impressive 7hr and 50min of battery life. Our loop tests which included 1.5hrs of phone calls, 4hrs of video and 4hrs of audio, showed that the Fire XT will very easily last you a day of heavy usage. I guess, Motorola makes up a bit for the other shortcomings in the battery department.

Verdict
At Rs.12,990, the Fire XT is too expensive for what it has to offer and quite frankly even if it was cheaper, we wouldn’t recommend it since it’s simply not a very good phone. It does have some things going for it like a good form factor and decent build quality, functional music player, Gingerbread and a good battery life but the cons outweigh the pros quite significantly. It’s slow to use, the screen is of very poor quality and average camera performance. We’d recommend putting in a little more money and getting the Motorola Defy or if you want to spend less then you really can’t go wrong with the Micromax A70.