Tech Review

Motorola ZN4 Krave Phone, Black (Verizon Wireless)

Because we're continually burdening cell phones with more and more tasks--PIM, Internet, Music, TV, movies--while insisting that they remain portable and stylish, they have inevitably become a compromise product. The craze for texting, one of the only teen things to which I've succumbed, for example, has necessitated a one-button-per-letter QWERTY keyboard for quick text entry which has also meant that the average phone size has gotten bigger for the first time (remember that scene in Zoolander with the microscopic phones?). The two ways to include a QWERTY keyboard in phones have been to include real buttons or go with a touch screen. Touch screens are less bulky and sometimes allow more screen real estate for videos and internet, but aren't ideal because they lack tactile feedback and thus lead to more errors.

Zoolander (Special Collector's Edition)

Designers have come up with various ways to reduce these errors. The Apple iPhone lets you know that you've pressed a certain letter by making it bigger or having it "fly out" as you touch the screen. Other companies use some kind of "haptic" feedback, usually a vibration that greets your touch. My phone, the Storm, has "Surepress" which makes the screen into a big button like some Apple touchpads.

It's odd that this compromise solution has changed from a non-ideal way to deal with a vexing problem to a selling point, as one may infer from the "Touch screen!" ads in the paper. I think touch screens are to be avoided if at all possible since typing on a real keyboard like the ones on the Blackberry Bold or, the best one that I've tried, the LG EnV2, is always a superior experience.

BlackBerry Bold 9000 Phone, Black (AT&T)

LG enV2 VX9100 Phone, Black (Verizon Wireless)

Where does that leave the Krave?

The Motorola Krave is the world's first, and I predict last, flip phone touch screen.

The Krave has has all of the drawbacks of a touch screen without its main benefit, a larger screen size on a smaller overall phone. Usually, a flip phone has a keypad with physical buttons with a LCD screen above, when it's open. The Krave has virtual buttons under a blank, clear, and bothersome lid. The touch screen is too sensitive and the icons too small make typing accurate, two issues that neither the annoying haptic feedback nor the flyout letters overcome.

The accelerometer turns the keypad into a QWERTY keyboard whose almost complete unusablility should earn it the more more descriptive name, "CRAPPY." Why? Because the flip door prevents one from gripping the phone in any comfortable manner. One needs to hold the phone completely from the bottom, as if your hands were a gun rack. For the time my wife had the phone, she'd have to hold the phone with one hand and peck at it with the other.

That the cover protects the screen and gives you a few buttons you'll never use doesn't make up for the fact that it makes the phone thicker.

Better that the cover were left off the device altogether.

Other annoyances: It's impossible for the music player to play a whole genre or artist-- you have to drill down to an album. Excellent freeware program Bitpim doesn't recognize the Krave and Motorola requires proprietary cables and chargers.

Call quality? Who cares, at this point?

The one positive, and the reason I purchased it in the first place, is that the phone has a regular 3.5mm mini audio plug instead of the 2.5mm you usually see. Yay!

I'm just a picky squid? My non-aligned wife hated it. She enjoys her LG Chocolate 3 about 300 times better.

LG Chocolate 3 Phone, Black (Verizon Wireless)