Unboxing the Motorola Devour

Another day, another Android phone with BLUR. The Motorola Devour is Verizon’s take on the Motorola CLIQ. It’s billed as a baby Motorola Droid of sorts, except it’s not!

The Devour looks like a premium device. The body is machined out of a single block of aluminum, just like the MacBook Pro. The spring-loaded sliding mechanism of the QWERTY keyboard feels truly fantastic, and the optical trackpad is a lovely touch. In that respect, it’s nicer than the CLIQ and the Droid…

But it’s also rather thick, and there’s a lot of wasted space above and below the screen (3.1″). The keyboard offers surprisingly little key travel/feedback, and the shift key placement is awkward.

The camera is a disaster. Instead of featuring a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus like the CLIQ and the Droid, the Devour is demoted to a 3 megapixel camera devoid of autofocus, which is somehow extremely poor at shooting stills. Video recording is handled better with VGA support (640×480 at 30 fps).

For the record, it’s possible to make a decent 3 megapixel camera without autofocus – see the Palm Pre :)

Ultimately the Devour suffers from the same malaise as the CLIQ – i.e. BLUR. It’s slow, unintuitive, and dilutes the Android experience. At least there’s a relatively untouched build of Android 1.6 under hood, unlike others.

Check out my unboxing pictures and video:

Special thanks to the folks at Verizon for sending me a review unit.