Motorola Dext MB200
Motorola has been silent for a long time, but it has finally brought out the Dext – the first phone in years that can be spoken of in the same breath as the Palm Pre and HTC Hero.
The Dext is a pretty big device, thanks to packing a full QWERTY keyboard and a 3.1-inch capacitive touchscreen. It feels like two phones merged together – with a super thin iPhone-a-like on top with a chunky physical keyboard beneath.
It’s similar in form factor to the HTC Touch Pro 2 rather than the T-Mobile G1, and the top portion is – in an uncharacteristic move from Motorola – poorly connected to the bottom, with a large amount of wiggle making the whole thing feel cheaper than it should.
The layout of the phone is not so great though. The keyboard is decent enough, with an Alt and Shift key (two of the latter) giving easy access to a number of characters, but the other keys aren’t so ergonomically intuitive.
The front of the phone hosts the three main buttons (no wealth of HTC-like keys here). It’s basically a menu key, home button and back key, with the search button put on the QWERTY keyboard (which we must say is a more sensible place for it on such a phone.
