Motorola MOTO U9 Review

Camera:

The 2-megapixel camera on the U9 is put just for snapping pictures which are not important. It is not a key feature for the device, and doesn’t pretend to be one. The Viewfinder shows up a couple of seconds after the key on the left is pressed, occupying the whole display. Unfortunately, the saving time is very long and after the shutter is pressed, you’d have to wait about 7 second to store the photo to the memory card and then show the interface to take another. The latter is pretty basic, typically for Motorola but offers Scenes, color styles and tagging for organizing the photos later. Videos can be taken at mediocre resolution, suitable for MMS messages only.







Don’t expect it to replace your real camera; as we’ve said earlier it is just for snapping a picture and the image quality is pretty low, even when compared to other similar phones.


Multimedia:

Although not a ROKR, the Motorola MOTO U9 is a music-friendly clamshell. The Media Finder is an application that will retrieve all files from the phone and sort them so you can choose for example Music, Video or Pictures.


You will be able to filter your tracks by Artists, Albums, Genres, and Composers or by Playlists. The Now Playing interface shows information on the track and has a tiny album art cover, which we would have preferred to be bigger. When the player is minimized to play in the background, the lower part of the home screen transforms into a shortcut to it. When you close the shell, the external display shows what’s playing and right below it three touch-sensitive buttons for the player will appear.

The video playback is not one of the strengths of the phone either. Standard MPEG4 H.263 videos with QVGA resolution that are played on most mid and high level phones cannot be opened on the U9. You are limited to 3GPP which has very low quality.