Finally, I am ready to say a few words about the Motorola Charm. The reason I really wanted to review this phone is because of the QWERTY keypad. Most of you will be wondering if this phone can be a replacement for your BlackBerry, don’t you? Well, you will get an answer at the end of this review .

Before that, let’s take a look at the unboxing photos. What are the accessories that you should get when you purchase this phone? Below are some photos for you :

 

 

 

Accessories – 1130mAh battery, charger adapter, USB cable and handsfree. There is also 2Gb Micro SD card by default in the package. If you get it from an Authorised dealer in Malaysia, then you will have a Brightstar warranty card and sticker on your accessories.

 

 

That is how the phone looks like. Some of you may find the design to be funny. As for me, it looks something different. It is compact and user friendly . The phone is only loaded with Android OS 2.1 (Eclair) and the user interface has been re-constructed by Motorola so that it fits the low resolution screen.

Exterior

The whole body is made of plastic but I don’t find any problem with that. Everything is fitted tightly and the weight is just nice, at 110 grams. Build quality is good. The Gorilla glass display is another plus point for the Motorola Charm where you do not need to worry much about your phone’s screen having scratches. (well, that does not mean that you can purposely try scratching your phone’s screen . It can still get scratched. )

On the left bottom, you will find the micro-USB port which is used for PC connectivity as well as charging the phone. If you see on the image above, there is a translucent plastic which is surrounding the USB port. While the phone is being charged, that plastic will be in green to indicate that the phone is still charging. Once it is fully charged, you will no longer see the green light.

On the upper left is the volume rocker.

 

You can find the 3.5 mm audio jack and the power/lock switch at the top.

 

When you try to switch on the device, it will take a little longer compared to any other Android phones so please hold the button for at least 7-8 seconds before you decide to plug it to the charger.

 

There is nothing on the right side of the phone. At the right bottom (at the edge) is the lanyard hole.

 

Front is as usual. The earpiece is at the top and below the screen, you will find the menu, home and back key. The QWERTY is the main highlight of this phone. I love the keypad so much because although it looks like the buttons are cramped, but you will not have any difficulty to type with it. There are some shortcut keys on the keypad such as the camera activation key (can also be used to snap photos), messaging key and search key.

 

At the back, you will find the 3 Megapixel camera, track pad (the big square thing just next to the camera) and loudspeaker (the green thing at the bottom).

 

 

2Gb micro SD

Calling and other phone related features

Call quality is good. The separate noise cancellation mic is doing well to keep your voice clear when talking on the phone. I also don’t see any significant network drop, no matter how I grip the phone. I have no complaints for this part. SMS/MMS is excellent because of the QWERTY keypad. You will definitely enjoy it.  The rest are quite same with other Android 2.1 phones.

Multimedia features – camera, camcoder, video playback, music player

For those who gives priority for these features, the Motorola Charm is not for you. Well, it is not that bad but it is definitely not going to fulfill your high expectations. As for photos, the 3 Megapixel takes some decent shots in the bright. The snaps are quick and you will hardly have shaky images. The snapshots will be suitable for casual users. Since the phone doesn’t come with a flash, you are definitely not going to use the phone to take any night shots without proper lighting. You can also make use of the zoom function but the photos will be highly distorted. The maximum zoom is 5X.

Please do not use the video recording feature to take any important and memorable video. I am sure that you will regret. I had regrets too. The maximum resolution of the video is 352×288 (CIF) and you can see the distortion when you play back the video that you have recorded. I will definitely avoid taking videos using this phone unless necessary. By the way, your videos will be saved in .3gp format. The length of the videos are depending on the available storage space in your memory card. Also take note that there is no zoom function when you record a video.

Music playback and video playback for this phone is OK. Not bad and not good, but OK. It can play most types of video formats (similar to other Android phones).

The built in music player is too plain. Even the music setting such as equaliser etc are placed in the phone’s main setting area. That is quite troublesome as I cannot make the changes from the music player itself. Music quality is not the best but good enough casual listening. I suggest you to use some good quality headset for better music listening. As for loudness, it is quite loud I would say. Not too loud but louder than many other Android devices that I have tried.

This phone also has a radio function. No major complaints about it. The only issue that I have is where the reception is quite bad for some radio stations. I tried playing the same radio station using my HTC Desire Z and the quality is superb. Well, that only happens for some radio stations. If you are trying to listen to a major station, there will be no problem.

Display, connectivity and battery life

The connectivity options are same as other Android devices. You will find no issues with connectivity when you use this phone. It has almost all types of connections – bluetooth, WLAN b/g/n, 3G with HSDPA, email etc. You can also connect your phone to the PC to charge your phone. That is all standard anyway. You will find those options in many other Android phones.

Display – this is where the Motorola Charm gets its bad name. Firstly, the screen resolution is very poor. It is just 320 X 240 pixels. Android OS is not very suitable for low resolutions and due to that, there are some apps which doesn’t load well or can’t be installed. I am OK with the display size (2.8″) but not with the resolution. The fonts look pixelated and the images look distorted and less colorful.

Battery life (1130mAh) – before I bought this Motorola Charm, I read a lot of reviews about the phone and ALL of them complains about the poor battery life. Well, I don’t complain. Overall, it is OK. I see that all Android phones generally have poor battery life and for Motorola Charm, the battery life is within the satisfactory level.

Sometimes, I need to charge the phone after 18 to 20 hours of usage and sometimes it can even go up to a day. Please take note that for Malaysia units, you will only get a 1130mAh battery. I am mentioning this because there are other reviewers from overseas who gets a 1170mAh battery or a 1130mAh battery + 1340mAh battery for their Motorola Charm. All that are depending on the region and the telco that subsidize your phone.

By the way, my usage pattern is as below (24 hours battery life) :

phone call – 5 minutes or less

smses – 1 or 2

email – 20 to 30

push email activated and most of the time is connected via WiFi

web surfing – 5 minutes

social networking – 20 minutes

chat – always on. Active chat about 10 minutes

apps which connects to internet – 20 minutes

Well, that is not much but I can’t do anything else with the poor display resolution.

Web browsing, email, social networking and IM

I know that all this while, my comment was not so good about the Motorola Charm. At this part, I finally have a reason to say some good things about the Motorola Charm. This is a messaging device. It is not for entertainment (although it can still do it) but mainly focused at messaging, email, chat and so on.

Web browsing is not enjoyable with the 2.8 inches screen of Motorola Charm. At the same time, it will still be able to satisfy you during critical times. The pinch to zoom works very well for web browser. There are times where I can’t zoom the screen. Not sure why did that happen.

Email – no issues. The QWERTY keypad helps a lot when it comes to replying emails. This is the plus point of Motorola Charm compared to other Android devices. I don’t mind sending long emails when using the Motorola Charm.

Social networking – it is similar to other Android devices. No issues. Unfortunately, there are some hiccups due to the screen resolution. Scrolling through the tweets/Facebook news will be annoying at times because you may accidentally click at one of the news when you don’t intend to do so.

IM – There is no native IM app for Motorola Charm. So you need to make use of 3rd party IM. Nimbuzz works great for this phone. It is 100% compatible for the Motorola Charm. I also tried ebuddy but the software itself is buggy and not good for any Android phones for now (unless they fix the ring tone bug). Unfortunately, the popular MSN messenger, the MSN Talk app is completely missing from the Android Market. Is it due to Android 2.1 (Eclair) or the phone itself? I am not sure why.

Operating System (OS), softwares and other features

Some may say that the Android 2.1 (Eclair) is not too bad. It is still considered as new. As for me, it is already an outdated version because I tried Froyo 2.2 and there are a lot of good features which are missing in the Eclair 2.1. Hoping for an update, I personally sent an email to Motorola to ask if there is any further update for the Motorola Charm. The person who replied my email said that she will pass it to another person to answer. That was 2 weeks back and I’ve not got a reply from them (yet). I have a feeling that there will be no further update for the Motorola Charm.

User interface can actually be better. It is not well polished and whenever I look at the screen, I feel that the widgets are stuffed everywhere and it is due to the small screen resolution, the information displayed in some of the widgets are not really useful.

Track pad – this is very useful to scroll around e.g. while surfing websites. The function is same as the trackpad at the front which can be found in Blackberry models. For some people, it can be annoying because of the placement, which is at the back. You need to get used to it so that you can utilise it well. Otherwise, I suggest you to turn off the trackpad feature (can be found at the setting).

Android market – when the Motorola Charm was released, the new Android Market was not available yet. Everything looks nice and there is no compatibility issue. Once the latest version of Android Market was released, there is already a problem there due to low screen resolution. You can’t view the list of applications unless you rotate the screen.

Big issue with Motorola Charm – the auto shut down issue. I am also having this problem where I tried 3 different sim cards and 2 out of the 3 sim cards makes the phone to shut down automatically. That is very annoying and frustrating. After doing some search, I found out that the problem is very common among Motorola Charm phones. Here is the link from official Motorola page where a lot of people are complaining about it (LINK). I am surprised that Motorola is not doing anything to fix it because it is a major issue which keeps away people from buying this phone.

As for the auto shut down issue, I have a doubt that it can be due to the sim card incompatibility issue. The 1st 2 sim cards which I had a problem are 128K sim and the 3rd one is a 64k sim. Probably the Motorola Charm is not compatible with 128k sim. My 64k sim is working fine for nearly 10 days without any shut down issue.

Another problem that I have (due to the screen resolution) is I am unable to open any email attachments from my Gmail account (using the gmail app for Android). If I receive a email with attachment, I just can’t see the links to open/download/preview my attachments as how I see on my HTC Desire Z. Due to that, I have to use my phone browser to get the files.

However, I don’t have that problem with my MS Outlook (exchange) account.

 

Conclusion – what do I think about the Motorola Charm?

This device is suppose to be an entry level phone but the price here in Malaysia is RM1399 (RRP). You can’t find it any lower than RM1350 for authorised sets and that is still expensive for this phone if I consider the problems that it has. If the price is reasonably set (at RM1100 or RM1000), then it is more worthy to buy. I will go for Samsung Galaxy 5, Galaxy 3, HTC Wildfire or HTC Aria (higher end) without any hesitation only if I don’t need a QWERTY keypad.

I don’t think Motorola is going to continue its support (frequent updates etc) for this device. Android OS is being constantly updated by Google and some of the popular brands who quickly update their devices are HTC, Samsung and Google itself. Other brands (including Motorola) are very slow in coming up with updates or they don’t update the software at all. This will be an important point to consider when buying Android phones.

It is a very nice device for those who text a lot or need to reply a lot of emails on the go. Unfortunately, the problems are just too many (as I’ve mentioned above). I suggest you to wait for an update for the Motorola Charm before getting one or get another phone which is less buggy and have more support from the manufacturer.

Overall, the Motorola Charm has great potential to be a rival for BlackBerry ONLY if the phone is stable and free from bugs.