Motorola Triumph on Virgin Mobile

Overall I’ve been quite happy with Virgin Mobile as a wireless provider. Their prices are reasonable, their data plan (though not ideal) is certainly one of the most sane out there on the market, and their coverage in my area is good enough. Their main weakness up to this point has been a limited selection of handsets.


I bought and loved the LG Optimus V. It’s a great low-power Android phone that offered most of the experience I wanted coming from an iPhone 3GS. The fact that it could be had for less than $200 without a contract was icing on the cake. I think it’s down to $150 or less now, depending on the retailer.

When Motorola announced a new Droid-like model was coming to Virgin, my ears pricked up. The hardware they advertised looked impressive: 1gHz Snapdragon processor, 512MB of RAM, 720p recording and micro-HDMI output.

Best Buy started taking preorders about a month ago, and I found out it was going to cost only $300. I began to get excited. I ordered, hoping my early initiative would land me one around launch day.

Sadly, Best Buy’s preorder system failed, and I ended up being backordered. I canceled the order and drove to my local brick-and-mortar store, which had two of them in stock and ready to go. Irony, thy name is Best Buy.

I went home and charged the phone. While I was waiting I went through the process on Virgin Mobile’s website to swap my plan over to the new handset. This could have gone smoother.

The swap happened almost instantaneously, and I was sent an email. So far so good. The email told me I just needed to program my phone (read: activate it). I used the handy-dandy “Activate” app, which thought really hard for about five minutes and then belched out an error message, telling me to call customer service.

The problem was, without an active phone I couldn’t call anyone. I decided it was probably a network congestion problem (launch day and all) so I hooked up the phone to my wifi and started getting it the way I wanted.

Three hours and innumerable downloads later, I decided to try to activate again. Still no luck. For those of you interested, the error message was: “Service is not available. Error 06-07-5910.” For whatever reason, my brain focused on the indecipherable error code rather than the sentence before it.

It was pretty late, so I decided at this point to go to bed and deal with it in the morning. Once I was upstairs and settling in, I figured on a whim to try activating again. This time it worked. My best theory was that I got a better signal upstairs, thus “service was available.”

I’ve played with the Triumph for about a day now and I’ve come away with several impressions, which I’ll list below.

Positives:

• The screen is a lot crisper than the Optimus V. I felt like I was going from 640x480 to 800x600 (which I think is pretty close to reality).
• The speaker on the Triumph is very strong. I was able to listen to Pandora with it on my nightstand and hear the music clearly from the next room.
• There’s no background hiss when using my headphones on the Triumph. This is an improvement over the Optimus V.
• The camera has an LED flash, and can record 720p video (in theory)
• Angry Birds Rio runs beautifully, and every game I’ve thrown at it so far plays just as well.
• Recessed buttons feel solid and well-made.
• It does Flash…not that I use it much.
• There’s a front-facing camera. I’m not sure I’ll ever use it, but it’s nice to have I guess.
• No MOTOBLUR! Like the Optimus V, the Triumph has stock Android 2.2.

Negatives:

• The colors aren’t as vibrant as the Optimus V. Everything looks slightly washed out when you look at them side-by-side.
• The media volume (especially in games) is ridiculously loud. I have to turn the sound down to almost nothing just to keep from bursting my eardrums.
• No cases are available for the Triumph just yet, and being a prepaid phone it’s not likely to have a wide variety when there are.
• Battery life isn’t as good as the Optimus V on default settings. Juice Defender helps with that significantly, but the battery itself has a lower maximum capacity.
• Reception seems to be worse than the Optimus. I rarely get more than 2 bars on the Triumph, but then again it only has 4 bars total (the Optimus had 6) so it might just be my imagination.
• It’s heavier than you might expect, especially if you’re holding it for a long time while playing a game.
• The buttons one the sides are a little *too* recessed. It’s kind of hard to feel my way around the volume when it’s in my pocket.
• Gingerbread (Android 2.3) would have been a nice thing to have at this point. Hopefully Motorola will give us an update soon.
• No micro-HDMI cable in the box.

Some other odds and ends I’ve come across: the spare charger and USB data cables that I bought for my Samsung Messager Touch actually fit the Triumph, so I didn’t have to immediately go out and buy more chargers. Also, the screen film that came out of the box is actually not bad. I’m leaving it on for now until I get a more permanent solution.

I didn’t have any trouble with my Sony MDR-EX38i headphones, aside from the expected lack of volume control. This seems to be an issue with Android 2.2 in general. Otherwise, the button worked fine for answering the phone and play/pause/skip media playback.

I haven’t tried syncing my Samsung Bluetooth earpiece yet, but I don’t expect to have any issues there either. I’ll post back in a week or so if anything positive or negative jumps out at me. For the moment, I consider the Motorola Triumph a worthy upgrade to the Optimus V, and a great contract-free option for average smartphone users that don’t need a dual-core processor or gimmicky 3D cameras.