Complete Review of Motorola Admiral

December 28, 2011 John Reyvaldi Review

Personally, we love to having a handset with the simple candybar model and mini QWERTY keyboard at the bottom of it’s screen. But it seems like the market has been changing now. This kind of model is abandoned and replaced with soft button model, slide out keyboard, or even dual screen mode.

That is the main reason why we decided to give you our complete review about Motorola Admiral. It has the traditional BlackBerry look and currently run on Android 2.3 platform. Motorola Admiral is basically a faster and newer version of it’s predecessors, Motorola XPRT. This handset is currently available on C Spire for $99.99 plus some contract deal. With those price, you can also take advantage from Sprint’s Direct Connect feature. So, without any more delay, let’s start the review.

Design

If you familiar with BlackBerry Curve, the you must be agree with us that Admiral is a skinnier and longer version of Curve. This handset is currently sports 3.1 inch screen size. At the bottom of the display, you’ll find the four physical buttons that control Android’s OS main function. Volume button, Direct Connect control, and micro USB port are placed on the left hand side. If you’re looking for the power button and audio jack, you can find it on the top side of the phone. On the back of it’s textured surface, there’s primary camera unit. The specially dedicated camera button is currently placed on the right side of Admiral. Overall, this phone is well build and it feels so good when we hold on to this device.

Take a look this device from side view and we realized that it is thinner on it’s bottom than on top side. This awkward design make the keyboard keys usually slop away from us. But that is not a problem at all. Might not the most compact handset in the market, but due to it’s small screen and keyboard, we feel that Motorola Admiral is little bit tiny. However, this device is currently weighs at 4.7 ounces, which give you some solid feels when you carry it.

Motorola was designed this smartphone to be able to resist splash, dust, and shock. We already testing it by dropping the phone, tossed it on a wall, and it seems like the back cover is easily removed from it’s original location. But when we try to turn it on, we’ve got no problem at all.

Keyboard

Motorola Admiral got pretty well-made keyboard. Although it has tiny size, we find no problem to do some fast typing. It is even better than slide-out keyboard that Samsung give to Captivate Glide. To us, the keyboard is perfectly sized. It is look and feel completely like a BlackBerry keyboard, which is good.

Display

You might consider the 3.1 inch screen as small, but it is definitely bigger that any other candybar device. But with 640×480 display, everything is seems not look good enough. Personally, we prefer the 4:3 screen ratio, but that will reduce the phone experience. The font size is to small. If you’re currently middle aged, you might have to bring the handset closer to your nose to see what is exactly written there.

The color variation is also disappointing. Overall, it is washed out and muted. Everything is displayed softer and seems like lack of contrast.

Software

Motorola Admiral is currently work under Android Gingerbread platform and with the addition of Motorola Blur for it’s UI tweak. Grey is the basic color scheme here, which is good due to mediocre display quality. However, Motorola don’t make to much UI tweak in here. Compared to Droid RAZR, it is quite silent and minimalistic.

There’s several bloatware such as Sprint Zone, Sprint Radio, Sprint Music Plus, and Sprint Mobile Wallet. Other apps include NASCAR app, a Phone Portal app, and TeleNav GPS. Some of them is removable but the rest is not, so you just have to stick with those rubbish program.

We find better experience with Motorola Music app. It can handle music podcast, internet radio, and DLNA function. This is surely better and more powerful than any other Android device. We even dare to describe this one as the real challenger for iPod music player.

Camera

Admiral has 5 megapixels primary camera. The image quality is decent. But the shutter speed is really slow that you might miss some moment if you want to capture a fast moving object. You’ll get soft color and little bit noise, even under good light condition. But it is more than enough to be used on your Facebook. It is also capable to record HD 720p video, which is also feature some noise, but should be no problem if you only aim to use it on your YouTube account.

Performance, Call Quality, Battery Lifetime

All basic function like text, email, and call functioned well. Although the 1.2 GHz single-core processors is no match to these days dual-core chip. Overall it has great performance for an old-fashioned smartphone.

We experience difficulties while trying to tap and scroll through the phone system. Sometimes the phone recognize our tap gesture as scroll. We are recently launch an app when we wanted to scroll the menu. Due to it’s medium response, if you do series of tap it will do several action consecutively and this is very annoying.

Call quality is rather medium than fine. Already test it using the earbud and loudspeaker mode, but the caller sound muffled to me. On the other side, our friend told us that we are currently sound like we’re talking behind a blanket. When we plug in the earphone, the caller sound will be immediately louder. So loud that we can’t hear what is they exactly wanted to say.

Sprint 3G network work pretty well in our office. We’ve got average 52kbps download speed. On the other side, upload speed is faster, normally we’ve got somewhere around 300 to 500kbps. Video streaming is not recommended under Sprint 3G network. You’ll be constantly facing the round animation of buffering.

The most standout thing is Admiral’s battery lifetime. It could last up to one days on standby mode.If you’re currently used it for daily task like email, message, or browsing, it will last up to 12 hours.

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