A few months back, now, I traded in my Samsung Moment for my first keyboardless smartphone, the Motorola Photon.  The Photon (as with most keyboardless phones) is substantially thinner than my Moment, and a whole heck of a lot faster. I’m not going to bore you with specs, but it’s very comparable to my Viewsonic gTablet, in terms of hardware.

Overall, I’m very happy with the hardware, though battery life could always be better. Motorola’s interpretation of Gingerbread leaves little to be desired, except that screen rotation is limited to 3 of the 4 main directions (It doesn’t work upside down, vertically). The camera is about as you’d expect for a smartphone: Lots of pixels and quite good in bright light, but lacking when left to it’s LED “flash”.  The GPS module gets a lock almost instantly, even indoors.

From a software standpoint, I’m learning a lot about predictive typing (and I’m not sure that I like it). What I do love is SwiftKeyX’s voice transcription capabilities, which I believe use a Google web service. Google Voice Search (which includes some phone automation commands) is also very good.  It’s completely viable to do most phone operations via voice.

I’ve picked up a few accessories, including an extended battery, and an Otterbox Defender (which can’t be used together, sadly), which I’ll discuss later.

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Products, Technology by Kevin