Motorola Pro+

 

The Pro+ is Motorola’s latest business- focused Android handset, featuring a full QWERTY keyboard and is geared towards stealing some of the BlackBerry lunch. Can it entice us away from RIM’S range of devices, though?

Design

The Pro+ includes a 3.1-inch capacity touch screen that’s bright and sharp. The resolution is 640X480 pixels.  These days, there’s really no excuse for a second-class QWERTY keyboard though, so the one on the Pro+ is a disappointment. It has 35 smallish keys, and while it’s nice to see the “@” symbol and a voice input key right up front, the keys are unnecessarily fiddly to use. The number keys are also arranged in a single line along the top, as with a computer. It’s not terrible, just not as good as you’ll find on similar keyboards from BlackBerry, HTC and Sony Ericsson.

Performance

While the keyboard is below par, the performance is even more so., despite a good-looking spec including a 1GHz processor backed by 512MB RAM, the Pro+ operates alarmingly slowly and there’s distinct lag when moving between apps. Some of the blame may be down to the Moto blur user interface, which is deeply integrated into the operating system.

Moto blur offers a selection of boxy widgets that show your latest social networking updates, including dedicated boxes for your very favorite people. Usefully, you can resize the boxes depending on how important you think they are. You can also sync with your PC using the Moto Phone Portal, which can connect both via wired USB connection or Wi-Fi.

Camera and web

The 5-megapixel camera offers autofocus and an LED flash as well as a broad suite of editing facilities. There are also quick options to share your photos online.

The Android web browser looks as it should, but tends to render pages a little too slowly for comfort, and despite supporting Flash video, often looks jerky when streaming. However, there’s a full version of Quick office available, allowing you to create and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

There’s 4GB of memory on board, though you can add up to 32GB more via microSD card. The 1500mAh battery holds up pretty well, delivering a good day and a half’s worth of fairly heavy use.

Conclusion

The Motorola Pro+ looks good on paper, with an improved screen, updated Android OS, decent build quality and an okay camera, as well as Quick office, but its slow performance and less than impressive keyboard count against it.