Review: Motorola Fire XT & Fire

Over the past few months, a plethora of affordable Android-based phones have hit the market, all jostling for attention in the exploding smartphone market. We have seen HTC, Samsung, LG and Micromax, all sprucing up their affordable Android portfolio. Motorola too isn't far behind, albeit a little late to the party. The recently Google acquired Motorola Mobility has just added two new Android-powered phones, Fire XT and Fire, to its line-up in a bid to bolster its offering in the sub-Rs 15,000 category. Though the phones come with decent horsepower and pack enough muscle to compete with other low-end smartphone rivals, there are a few letdowns as well. Inspired by the design of HTC Wildfire, Fire XT feels light in the hand at 114 gram with curved edges. Sporting a 3.5-inch touchscreen display, the smartphone leaves out physical Qwerty keyboard as found in Motorola Fire. The phone's front makes up for most of the display with Chrome borders, while the back gives a smooth, rubberised feel. Fire XT comes with 320x480 pixel resolution, making it a little above average for reading and browsing. The phone's touchscreen experience isn't too great to write home about. We felt it made the phone sluggish and unresponsive at times while swiping through the screen or scrolling the Menu. Below the screen sit four touch-sensitive buttons for Menu, Home, Back and Search. This is where the real disappointment lies. The touch-enabled buttons are unresponsive and require extra pressure to register the touch. The phone's onscreen QWERTY keyboard too makes for an average typing experience with little spacing between the keys. On the phone's top rests a tiny power button, along with a 3.5mm audio jack. On the right, the phone houses volume keys and camera shortkey, while on the left there's a USB port. Both Fire XT and Fire have the Android Market sitting right on the Home opening up the window to choose from over 2.5 lakh apps. There is an app Launcher icon on the Home that takes you to the bunch of pre-installed applications ranging from Google Maps, YouTube, Email, Google Search, Notepad, News & weather and Voice Search. Apart from the multiple home screens for personalization, the phones come with Moto Switch user interface that lets users switch between different modes like entertainment or business. Setting up Gmail on Fire XT was pretty fast, but it synced all the email contacts and Picasa albums at first. Something that without a prior prompt would end up eating much of your memory space. So, remember to uncheck the automatic sync data in the settings. The phone's 5 megapixel shooter with autofocus and LED flash does a decent job. The camera throws standard results. Given the phone's price point at Rs 13,000, the camera fairs well while shooting videos too. There's a 0.3 megapixel secondary camera for video calling also, which is not commonplace in smartphones of this range. For video chatting, the phone bundles Qik video app. Under the hood is a 800Mhz processor with pre-loaded Android OS version 2.3 Gingerbread. The phone has 512MB RAM and 512MB ROM that is expandable upto 32GB. Given the fuel, Fire XT turns out pretty good for most basics functions like messaging, gaming, social networking and music. However, the phone hung up at times amid heavy browsing. The pinch to zoom feature works pretty well. The phone's single speaker on the bottom centre looks like a tiny hole, but gives a fairly good output. The call quality too gave clear output, something that Motorola has always been good at. Battery life on Fire XT is not out of the ordinary, but good enough to last a day. Motorola promises 8 hours talk time and up to 28 days in standby on 3G. It was good enough for the day's average use of calling, browsing and applications. For connectivity, the phone packs all usual works, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, A-GPS, 3G, HSDPA up to 7.2 Mbps and the 3.5mm audio jack. To sum it up, the phone's definitely not a scene stealer, but can be among key competitors when you look at entry-level Android phones. If you can ignore a few shortcomings mentioned above, there are a few pleasant things to look at. Like the phone's good built, decent camera, personalized user interface (UI) and application experience. Just like the Fire XT, Motorola Fire also comes with rather neat specs, but is priced at a very competitive Rs 9,490 best price. A smaller 2.8-inch QVGA touchscreen is followed by a full physical QWERTY keyboard that makes it an ideal device for those with frequent emailing and messaging needs. Between the touchscreen and keypad, lie four touch-enabled keys just like the Fire XT, but a little more responsive that the latter. Behind the phone's plastic back is a 3 megapixel camera, but with fixed focus and no flash. There is of course no front camera for video calling in this lesser cousin. Fire too offers the same Android experience with native Android Gingerbread, and comes with Motorola's customization features. But with a 600 MHz processor, Fire obviously isn't so-very-ideal for gaming or watching videos. Also, with a low screen resolution at 320 x 240, the phone doesn't boast of a great browsing or reading experience. But Fire's touchscreen navigation and QWERTY keyboard is pretty neat. All in all, Fire could be worth a dekko at this price.