Motorola charm-part 2

Features

With Android 2.1, the Charm supports multiple user accounts, Microsoft Exchange, adaptive dictionary, speech-to-text, voice dictation, live wallpapers, seven homescreens, etc. The Motorola also runs a revised MotoBlur overlay with 10 proprietary widgets. They include individual toggles for Airplane mode, Backtrack, Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi, as well as standalone Weather, Sticky Note, Photos, Date and Time, and Music Player mini apps. They are resizable (tap and drag to adjust the size) on the home screen, but given that there isn't much screen estate to being with, the display gets cramped pretty fast. Of course, you'll also get the usual repertoire of Android widgets preinstalled.

The Charm won't blow you away with its features, but it's certainly equipped to handle most connectivity tasks via the HSDPA, Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth A2DP onboard. There's also support for handwriting input and little conveniences like auto-punctuation, but we find the onscreen keyboard (yes, you can enable that) functionally useless since it takes up most of the screen. Because of the landscape-type display, certain applications, such as Facebook and Twitter, which are designed to run in portrait orientation, brought about some inconveniences. And it had nothing to do with the built-in accelerometer, which automatically rotates the screen display. We could also download the popular game Angry Birds on the Charm, which ran rather smoothly on the phone save that some parts of the screen were chopped off, again due to the resolution limitation of the display. See assistant editor John Chan's take on Android fragmentation.
We also liked the Phone Portal app, which let us transfer content between the handset and computer using USB or Wi-Fi. Setting up the connection over-the-air was seamless and the app worked brilliantly. All we had to do was key in the unique URL and login with our username and password before the data on our phone appeared on the browser.

The basic 3-megapixel camera didn't charm us, though. Colors from our pictures were dull and displayed a slight poster-color effect. There were no autofocus and built-in flash, which ran down the imaging aspect of this Motorola. See some of our test pictures here.