Motorola Iron max: Motorola Motoluxe review (wried.co.uk)

Motorola Iron Max Motoluxe

Motorola Iron Max Motoluxe review

Motorola has been quietly beavering away on some interesting innovations recently, not least its high-end new RAZR series. But its bread and butter is in mid-range Android handsets like Motoluxe, which despite its premium sounding name and better than average camera is very much a middle-of-the-road phone.

Design

Style-wise it's the familiar Motorola-esque black slab but it has an extended lanyard slot at bottom left, with an insert green LED inside that lights up when you receive a message or when the phone's charging.

The four-inch screen offers a perfectly respectable 854x480 pixels, which works out at 244ppi -- it's not up there with the very best but it's certainly not bad, and looks crisp and detailed enough when surfing the web or viewing video.

Features

It's running Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread, so no Ice Cream Sandwich yet, if at all (Motorola won't confirm if an update is on the way, but apparently all Motorola phones are guaranteed at least one software update in their lifetime, so there's hope). Switch it on and you're presented with a twist on the lock ring we've seen on some of HTC's Gingerbread handsets. On this version there's a central key button surrounded by six programmable shortcuts for phone, browser, texting, email and calendar, plus a mute setting. You can open the last function you accessed by pulling the key outwards, or you can go straight to one of the functions by dragging it into the centre. It's a neat, time-saving feature.

Other Motorola tweaks include the Social Graph widget, which can be set to populate the screen automatically with pics of your most popular contacts (or you can set it up with your favourites manually). There's also the Activity Graph widget, which does the same for your most popular apps. Neither are essential, but they are useful, and help to make the phone a bit more distinctive.

Performance

The 800MHz processor backed by 512MB RAM won't come top in many hi-spec lists, but it did its job capably enough, with no obvious signs of lag. The eight-megapixel camera is a bit above the mid-range Android average by at least three megapixels. It's helped by a bright LED flash, autofocus and digital zoom and while picture quality is pretty good, there are other snappers that do better with these sort of specs, notably from Samsung and LG. On the downside, it takes a little too long to open and there's no HD video recording either, just standard-definition 800x489-pixel resolution.

There's a measly 300MB of memory on-board but you can insert a microSD card up to 32GB. The battery held up fairly well, delivering a solid day's worth of steady use.

Conclusion

The Motorola Motoluxe offers a decent range of features and just a little bit of Motorola personality to help it stand out from the midrange Android crowd.