Some of you are no doubt confused, since I just bought a Motorola Triumph last month. Wasn’t I perfectly happy with it? Didn’t I give it a glowing review? Well, some issues cropped up after the fact which I’ll go into more detail in a followup post. Suffice to say, my wife and I were in the market for new phones, and Sprint was the last major provider we hadn’t tried.
We perused the store and my eye gravitated to either the EVO or the EVO Shift. I liked the physical keyboard on the Shift, but the screen was much larger and looked nicer on the EVO. The sales person, Donna, was very knowledgeable and didn’t pressure me in any way.
She did however see that I was leaning toward the EVO and led me a little further down the row to a phone that they had just put on sale the week before. The specs were drool-worthy and the price was reasonable ($200 on contract).
I played with it for quite a while, asking every question I could think of. Donna didn’t flinch. She was very honest about problems and returns they’ve received for the various smartphones I looked at, even telling me that their number one return was the EVO for its brittle screen. After some discussion on plans and a number port later, I had myself a Motorola Photon 4G.
Hardware
The Photon feels very comfortable in your hands. The edges are rounded and the Gorilla Glass screen is very responsive. The display has a slightly blue tinge to it when you look at it sideways in the light. It reminds me a lot of the iPhone 3GS from a strictly tactile standpoint. You want to hold this phone, which is something I couldn’t say for the Triumph (or any other boxy phones like the Evo or Droid).
I didn’t have any of the ear-splitting volume problems with the Photon that I did with the Triumph. The lowest volume setting was (shock) actually quite low, and I had no difficulty finding a comfortable listening volume.
There’s 16GB of storage available on the device, so the lack of an included microSD card doesn’t sting too much. Before this phone I was getting by with a 4GB stick, so unless you’re just a serious audio/video person the stock memory is probably plenty for most people.
The camera is 8 megapixels and records HD video. I’m not a shutterbug, so I can’t really say what kind of quality it has. For the occasional home movie and snapshot of a strange street sign, it works fine. It has a dual-LED flash that I haven’t had the chance to try out yet.
The Photon has a SIM card, and it’s GSM compatible. In theory you can use this phone overseas, and Sprint is more than happy to charge you for it. I doubt I’ll use this capability, but it’s nice to know it’s there.
Software
The Photon 4G ships with Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread). I believe all smart phones should do this from now on. Unfortunately for some, the Photon also comes with the MOTOBLUR user interface slapped on top of it. I’ve not been terribly annoyed by it in the first few days of use.
The Android Marketplace has had a facelift since Froyo. It looks a lot more like the Windows 7 Mobile interface. Apps are just one panel now; you also get search results for books and movies. They’re separated, so it’s not too annoying.
Sprint has a number of apps on the phone by default: NASCAR, QuickOffice, Sprint ID, Sprint Mobile Wallet, Sprint Music Plus, Sprint Radio, Sprint TV & Movies, Sprint Worldwide, Sprint Zone, TeleNav GPS Navigator, and Webtop Connector. That last one is only useful if you buy a $100 dock accessory. No thanks.
Of the apps listed, I’ve only played with a few of them. I will never touch the NASCAR app. The Sprint Zone is basically a collection of web links for managing your account and offering generic suggestions for apps to download.
Sprint Music Plus plays your local music tracks (if you have any) and offers a store for music and ringtones. I didn’t see anything that made it better than Amazon MP3. Sprint Radio is exactly what it sounds like: a streaming radio app. You can choose local or internet radio stations to stream, and there are ads that pop up from time to time. You can also subscribe for no ads and a few extra features. I was unimpressed.
Sprint TV & Movies is kind of interesting. It offers a sort of on-demand service of pre-recorded shows as well as live streaming TV. Only about four channels are available for free, but Disney is one of them if that’s your cup of tea. The video quality was okay, but nothing special.
Unfortunately, probably due to licensing trolls, your GPS and cellular location info must be enabled to stream anything, or evn see the available channel list. That means you’re not going to want to use this app very far from a power outlet.
So let’s recap: Sprint has offered poor imitations of Amazon’s MP3 store, Pandora Radio, and Netflix. Not a great value proposition in my opinion, but they were “free” apps included on the phone, so there’s that.
Not all the included apps were useless, however. Sprint has a battery management app (accessible from Settings) that does a lot of the same things as my previous favorite: JuiceDefender. With Battery & Data Manager you can tell your phone to turn off background downloads after a certain amount of idle time, which helps the battery considerably. Several preset configurations are available and you have the option to create your own.
There’s also a Task Manager which lets you kill open applications and create an “auto-kill” list for when your phone is asleep. These two I can see myself using pretty reqularly, so props to Motorola for including them.
I downloaded one app that’s specifically made for the dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor: TegraZone Games. Basically it’s a gallery app with links to the Android Marketplace for games that are 3D-intensive or really power hungry.
Using TegraZone, I downloaded a game called Galazy on Fire 2 HD. It’s a free-flying space combat game. I played through the first couple of levels and the 3D graphics looked quite nice. There was a little stutter during the cutscenes but once I had control of the ship it was smooth sailing.
I’m also happy to report that Plants vs Zombies runs beautifully. The loading time I’d gotten used to on the Optimus V is basically nonexistent, and the graphics look pretty nice. It’s obvious where the developers used vector versus fixed-resolution though. Some animation really pops on the Photon’s larger, clearer screen where other graphics are rather blurry.
The stock Music app has been replaced with one that offers suggestions based on your music library. You can turn it off, and I did almost immediately. The added features didn’t add anything for me, personally.
Service and Reception
In my regular day-to-day activities I received an average of 3 bars (out of 6) for 4G and 5 bars for 3G. On my morning commute I had 5 bars of 4G. My office is kind of a 4G dead zone (thick concrete walls) so I got 1 bar of 4G, but 5 bars 3G. For those of you who prefer exact numbers, I ran the Speedtest app in three different spots (with 1 bar, 3 bars and 5 bars signal) with these results:
| ConnType | Download (kbps) | Upload (kbps) | Latency | ServerName |
| EvdoA | 7563 | 245 | 147 | Houston, TX |
| EvdoA | 9824 | 1229 | 143 | Houston, TX |
| EvdoA | 4535 | 537 | 142 | Houston, TX |
Download speeds for apps of the Android Marketplace were *very* fast on 4G. It took me all of 2 seconds to download the 2MB Pandora Radio app. Setting the phone up with all my favorite apps from the Android and Amazon app stores took less than thirty minutes, and that includes several large games from Popcap (Plants vs Zombies, Chuzzle, Peggle). Any time I’ve tried getting an odd app here or there they’ve downloaded almost instantly. I’m impressed.
The plan I’m on with Sprint now is their middle-tier “Everything” plan, which gives us unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes, unlimited texts, and 1500 landline minutes a month. Nights after 7pm and weekends are free. All that is pretty standard stuff. The thing that brings Sprint out in front of the pack (for now) is that the plan also includes unlimited data. Note that I didn’t add quotes or an asterisk.
As some of you know, I’ve had issues over the years with what most companies call “unlimited.” For Clear 4G, Virgin and Cricket 3G, and most of the major providers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile) you might get what they call unlimited, but what they really mean is “we’ll give you up to a capped amount at the speed you paid for, and after that you’re essentially on dial-up.”
Technically they can call this unlimited because you’re never really cut off, only throttled to the point where your mobile data becomes unusable. The size of the cap varies, anywhere from 2.5GB (Virgin) to 5GB (T-Mobile), but once you’ve reached that point you’re slapped down like a misbehaving child until your billing cycle resets.
I haven’t had Sprint for very long, so I can’t say for certain there isn’t some theoretical soft cap on their service. What I can say is that the literature of my contract (and their recent ad campaigns) says that I’ll get my 3G and 4G speeds for the duration, regardless of actual usage. If I bump into any caps, I’ll be sure to let you all know.
Battery Life
The battery in the Photon has a 1700 mAh capacity. From a strictly numbers game, that beats out the Triumph(1450 mAh) and the Optimus V (1300 mAh). I haven’t done thorough testing yet, but for my normal use (games, occasional app downloading, web surfing and Pandora radio) this translates to several more hours on a charge than the Triumph gave me. It might help that the Photon downloads things in a blink, so the processor isn’t stuck chugging away at dial-up speeds for several minutes at a time.
Random note here: the Photon uses the same charger as the Motorola Triumph and the Samsung Mesager Touch. It’s a mini-USB plug. All the chargers I had lying around the house for those two previous phones worked fine. If you don’t have any spare chargers, you can buy a 3-pack (wall, car, data) from Amazon for about $10 shipped.
Downsides and Weirdness
Not everything was sunshine and roses. The first model I got had a faulty battery compartment that wouldn’t snap shut in one place, leaving a slight bulge in one corner. The battery door clips on with six clips, and one of them was bent. I had it replaced.
Pandora Radio gave audible blips and stutters when I listened to it while navigating menus. Not sure what the deal is with that. This is my first experience with Gingerbread, so it could be a bug in either Android or the app. Either way it was annoying. I didn’t notice any interruptions in the music when I had the phone idling with the screen turned off.
The battery percentage seems to jump from 100% to 90% in a blink. The manual says it may take a few charge/discharge cycles before things get “optimized,” so that might be the problem. I’ll keep you all posted should it not rectify itself.
The Gorilla Glass picks up fingerprints something fierce. I’m glad it’s there, and that it’s not as susceptible to damage as a polycarbonate or even regular glass display would be… but I find myself constantly having to wipe it off.
As a Phone
Yeah, so it’s got a dual-core processor and more features than you can shake a stick at. All that would be useless if, you know, it didn’t actually work well as a phone. I’ll post back if this changes, but so far my experience using it for text and voice has been stellar.
The Photon gets clear, strong signals everywhere I go, in either 4G or 3G. I have yet to test it in the notorious dead zones around my house (Target, for instance) but I’ll post back when I do. I had no issues hooking the Photon up to my Bluetooth headsets (either the Samsung earpiece or the Motorola headphones).
UPDATE - I did have a chance to play with my Photon in the most common dead zone near my house: the Target electronics department (ironic, I know). I’m happy to report that although I didn’t have 4G, I did have a full 6-bar signal for 3G. My previous phones (including the iPhone) swapped to EDGE or reported no service in this area, so that’s a definite upgrade.
Conclusion
It’s been a while since I’ve played with a phone and had that “Ooooooohhh” moment like the little green guys on Toy Story. When I first picked up the Photon 4G in the store, that was how I felt. It’s just…superbly shiny. The thing is a beast in the hardware department, has great reception and call quality, and it manages to do all of it in a form factor that feels good in your hand.
0 comments:
Post a Comment