motorol fire xt review

[rahul.007]

REVIEW: Motorola Fire XT (guys sorry for the bad image quality.. had to shoot them via c3.. :\)

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1: Overview (design + Built)

• Motorola Fire XT is sleek and nice looking handset.
• It has a 3.5 inch capacitive touch screen in the front along with a VGA camera and ambient light + proximity sensors.
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• The backside has a 5mp autofocus camera with a LED flash.
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• The right side of the device has a camera button (with double click as it’s an autofocus cam) and a volume up-down button.
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• The top has a 3.5mm audio jack in the centre and a power/screen lock-unlock button.
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• The left side has micro-usb port for charging as well as data syncing.
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• The bottom is bare except for a small hole for mouthpiece.
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• The back-cover is rubberized for better grip.
• A stainless steel rim encircles the phone along its edges giving it a nice up market look.

THE PHONE DOES NOT HAVE A HOT-SWAPPABLE SIM OR MEMORY CARD SLOT

Verdict: 8/10 to moto for good built quality and design.

2: Hardware

• The phone is equipped with a Qualcomm 800MHz Scorpion Processor and Adreno 200 GPU.

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• It has 512mb ram and 512 mb rom.

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• It has 3.5inch 262k capacitive multitouch display capable of detecting 2 touches.

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• The phone scored 904 on Quadrant Benchmark (greater than Samsung Galaxy S, Google Nexus 1, HTC Desire and Motorola Droid-i don't know how? ).

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• It gave 50 fps on Neocore.

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• It gave 38.7 fps on Nenamark 1.

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* It has an accelerometer, g-sensor and magnetic compass.

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Verdict: 7.5/10

 

[rahul.007]

3: UI

(screen locked)
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(home screen)
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• The phone comes with Android OS version 2.3.4 Gingerbread.
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• Motorola has provided its own Motoblur interface over the stock android UI but it does very little (actually nothing) to change the stock android interface.

• The motoblur essentially provides us with 4 tabs (default, entertainment, business & personal), each having 5 home screens of its own.
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• The menu is also very basic with no 3-d view although Motorola provides us with tabs which you can name and group the apps.
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Verdict: 4/10 the Motoblur UI is not at all pleasing and Menu view is also very basic.

4: Camera

• The phone is equipped with a 5mp autofocus cam with led flash. The daylight images are OK.
• The images captured using LED flash (in dark) are of bad quality.
• Front-camera is a VGA camera hence strictly for video calls only.
• The videos are recorded in mp4, h.263 & h.264 in VGA format @ 30fps. Video quality is not up to the mark.

Verdict: 7/10 the video quality should have been a lot better.

5: Multimedia

• The phone has a nice speaker although if would have been appreciable if it was a little more loud.
• The stock android music player is very basic and it even lacks an equalizer. Although it can be solved by downloading a good player of your choice from the android market (I use Winamp).
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• The stock player has integrated internet radio support (shoutcast directory) which gives you access to 100+ internet radio channels.
• The video player is also very basic although the video playback quality is nice.
• The bundled headphones are BAD although it shouldn’t be a problem as you have 3.5mm audio jack.
Verdict: 7/10 the audio quality is good and the loudspeaker is loud.

THE PHONE HAS A FM RADIO

6: Battery
The most important aspect of a cell phone is its battery. The Fire comes with a 1420mAh battery. With about 2 hours of music playback, 1-2 hours of wifi usage & playing games for about 2 hours, the phone lasts me for about a day and a half.
Verdict: 7/10 It depends on your usage pattern.

7: Connectivity

-> The phone is equipped with 3G, wifi "n" and bluetooth 2.1.
-> It has 3G hotspot, Wifi tethering & USB tethering.
-> Wifi reception is good. There are no dropouts and browsing over wifi is a nice experience.

Battery tends to drain very fast when using wifi

Verdict: 7/10
8: Important Points

• The call quality is very good. The person on the other side is audible and his voice is also very loud and clear. The network reception of the phone is also very good(till now it has dropped the signal only once at Udyog Bhawan metro station whereas my Nokia 5230 used to drop the signal at Race Course, but it was also a very good handset). Noticed this thing today.
• The front cam cannot be used for native video calling over the network (as android doesn’t support video calling till now). It can be used for video calling over “QIK” (comes pre-installed). I tried to video call over Skype but was successful in voice calls only. Skype’s present version doesn’t support this phone for video calling (hopefully an update would solve this).
• The phone lags just for .5sec in the starting whenever I open fruit ninja but otherwise the working is smooth and never sluggish.

Final Verdict: 7.5/10
NOTE: I’ve browsed xda forums and a lot others on how to root this phone, but no one seems to know how to. Although some people have succeeded in doing so, but I will do so after some time. This is due to the locked bootloader. And also, the no of roms available for this is also very-very low.
Conclusion:
It is a nice vfm phone and at its price point(I got if for rs.12k), it’s a nice set having a lot of features. If you can wait for some time and have 15k, go for Sony Ericson Xperia mini pro. But if you have only 12k to invest, go for this set.
Note: This is my personal opinion.

this is my first review so please do tell me if i lack somewhere. And all the above views are my personal opinion.

And mods please can you shift this thread to "reviews" section. Noticed it right now..

 

[krishnandu.sarkar]

Instead of attaching pics as attachment, better add them between the reviews depending on the situation. It'd be much better.

 

[coderunknown]

@rahul, nice review & good point system makes things clear. 1 correction: ram is 512Mb but free ram will be ~280Mb at launch. will increase if you install custom rom. & rom is 512Mb also. 300Mb is needed for android files & usually 200Mb is free.

over time, number of roms will increase & its more about few quality rom. Cyanogenmod rom should be available preety soon.

 

[rahul.007]

@krishnandu.sarkar: done

@sam: thanks for the correction..

 

[mobilegeek]

@rahul.007

nice review, thanks for posting it.

Skype: I have checked the latest version supports it.

I am buying a phone for my sister, (about to order today) can you tell me how do you compare this phone with Defy Plus.

2ndly, You said camera is not that good. whats the quality exactly? are u comparing it with 8MP Cams? and how do you compare the camera quality with phone she is used to nokia N73 it was 3.2MPbut it captured good pics.

will wait for your reply..

 

[thetechfreak]

Neatly done job

 

[pratzgh1]

nice review mate.

 

[rahul.007]

Re: motorola fire xt review

@mobilegeek: thanks.. and the image/video quality when compared to other 5mps like SE xperia mini pro or samsung galaxy ace is not that good..
defy or defy + is better than fire xt.. but the only drawback is they lack a frontcam..

(sorry for the late reply.. was out of station..)


@thetechfreak & pratzgh1: thanks

note: os upgraded to android 2.3.5 via motorola software updater.. but it took a whopping 40mins.. till now no noticable change except that the battery life has increased a bit..

 

[$$Lionking$$]

nice review... and cool fone bro!!

 

[rahul.007]

@lionking: thanks bro

 

[yomanabhi]

Some people saying:
Not value for money thing. Using it from last 1 month 1) it hangs so many times,
2) Image and Video quality is poor.
3) Flash doesn't work while capturing Video,
4) You cannot Zoom in/out when you are captuing Video,
5) Cannot pause it when paturing Video,
6) Doesn't support Video formats,
7) Screen bottons sometimes not works,
8) Once you restart it, it take minimum counted 5 minutes to read phone book/msgs/gellary.
9) Phone memory is too low.

Go with any other one.

 

[coderunknown]

Some people saying:
Not value for money thing. Using it from last 1 month

if you need pure performance, not value for money anymore as HTC Explorer is available for just 9.5k.

1) it hangs so many times,
A: Android hangs. Remove blaotware or else try a custom rom.
2) Image and Video quality is poor.
A: Camera is 5Mp but not capable enough.
3) Flash doesn't work while capturing Video,
A: maybe custom rom can enable this. disabled at OS level to save battery
4) You cannot Zoom in/out when you are captuing Video,
A: same as above
5) Cannot pause it when paturing Video,
6) Doesn't support Video formats,
A: stock video player always sucks
7) Screen bottons sometimes not works,
A: driver problem. unoptimized OS.
8) Once you restart it, it take minimum counted 5 minutes to read phone book/msgs/gellary.
A: same as above. really, if you can try a custom rom. 99% problems are fixed in that.
9) Phone memory is too low.
A: you are the 9999999th person with Android mobile to complain about this

replies in green

 

[yomanabhi]

Should i go for Motrola Fire xt or Samsung galaxy ace or motorola defy

 

[coderunknown]

depends on budget. make a thread in Mobile buying advice filling up the questionnaire.

 

[rahul.007]

I'll suggest defy if you have the budget.

1) it hangs so many times,
A: Android hangs. Remove blaotware or else try a custom rom.
mine hasn't hanged even a single time till now. It did restart unexpectedly 2-3 times but thats not happening now
2) Image and Video quality is poor.
A: Camera is 5Mp but not capable enough.
already mentioned that in my review
3) Flash doesn't work while capturing Video,
A: maybe custom rom can enable this. disabled at OS level to save battery.
true.
4) You cannot Zoom in/out when you are captuing Video,
A: same as above
true
5) Cannot pause it when paturing Video,
6) Doesn't support Video formats,
A: stock video player always sucks
i don't use my cell's cam much, so ok for me.
7) Screen buttons sometimes not works
A: driver problem. unoptimized OS.
sometimes the back button gives some problem. have to press it a little harder. but rest are smooth
8) Once you restart it, it take minimum counted 5 minutes to read phone book/msgs/gellary.
A: same as above. really, if you can try a custom rom. 99% problems are fixed in that.
wrong. 2 mins(at the max after booting)
9) Phone memory is too low.
A: you are the 9999999th person with Android mobile to complain about this
true.

 

[varunparakh]

How z this, compared to HTC Explorer, looking for better pictures as well!

 

[rahul.007]

Explorer has a smaller but better screen.. but it lacks frontcam.. rest almost all the specs are same.. the cam on fire xt is better though..