Motorola QUENCH – New Tricks From an Old Dog

By Simon Drew

Motorola, the world’s third largest mobile phone maker after Nokia and Samsung has unveiled its latest Android smartphones at the recently concluded 2010 Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona.

The Motorola QUENCH with MOTOBLUR is its 8th Android sporting the older 1.5 Cupcake version just when many new unveiled Androids have started using the new 2.1 Éclair. But this just confirms our suspicion that because of its open source nature, Android versions, unless severely handicapped, can easily be tweaked to rival even the latest versions coming from Google.

It also further buttresses the observation that no upgrade paths are necessary. Versions remain as OS variants with UIs like Sense form HTC and UX from Sony Ericsson making an upgrade irrelevant. The suspicion is finally confirmed when Acer came out with the latest Liquid e showing nothing else but the new 2.1 Éclair OS when they could have just provided an OS upgrade to the older Liquid. Apparently, no upgrade path exists from 1.6 to 2.1.

New Features

Despite an old OS, the QUENCH can carry itself proud among the new smartphones running the new 2.1 Éclair, thanks to the Motorola innovations built into the 1.5 Cupcake. It starts with MOTOBLUR which Motorola calls as its content delivery system that promises a unique Android experience.

It syncs your phonebook contacts, media content and communications trail in MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and email accounts automatically on the home screen. Then there’s SWYPE, an entirely new method for text input form the same people who invented T9 predictive text. You only need a finger to swipe or trace the letters across a QWERTY keyboard on the touchscreen and the word gets spelled.

Its entertainment features also gets an innovative boost in media players that allow you to play while getting connected online to download new media content like Tune Wiki, SoundHound, GoTV and YouTube.

There’s even FM stereo streaming. The Motorola QUENCH enhances its telephony experience with noise cancellation technology and dual microphones for crystal clear voice calls. You can also benefit from its voice activated search facility that can launch Google Web search.

Apart form these, it’s your 3G phone with WiFi, HSDAP/HSUPA. You get a 3.1-inch QVGA capacitive touchscreen with 64k colors, accelerometer and proximity sensors. There’s a 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, geo tagging and CIF video recording at 25fps.

Other features include stereo FM with RDS, Bluetooth A2DP, 3.5m headphone jack and speakerphones. There’s 512 MB ROM and 256 MB RAM with 32 GB of microSD expandability.

Conclusion

To a large extent, the various Android versions whether old or new remind us of the many Linux flavours for the PC which created a fragmented market that essentially brought the Linux to fail in the home PC markets.

The QUENCH clearly shows you don’t need a new OS to compete and even edge out the competition using the new Éclair. Thanks to the Open Source nature of Android. But like Linux, it is creating a fragment markets this early and could end the same way.

For the sake of Android markets, we hope Google can get its act right and get a grip of its open source OS. As it is, with all the many OS variants and UI ported by different makers, a single upgrade to the latest 2.1 Éclair from Google, if and when that happens, would simply wipe out all the cool UIs ported into various smartphones. So you can kiss your HTC Sense or Sony Ericsson UX goodbye in one upgrade.

To find out more about the Motorola Quench you can visit best-mobile-contracts.co.uk. You can find more reviews for the Quench as well as a comparison of the best deals available.