Motorola DEVOUR A555 Review

Camera:

The camera interface is as basic as it gets, with only a few settings, such as 5 color effects, resolution (3MP, 2MP, 1MP), picture review times, and to record location info in the pictures. Images taken outside during the day by the DEVOUR’s 3MP fixed-focus camera are not in the same category as ones taken by the 5MP DROID, as they have poor color representation, jagged edges, block pixelation, and look blurry most of the time. Indoor images come out even worse, as low-light levels show more grain, and since there’s no flash, don’t expect to take any night pictures. Videos however look pretty good when played back on a PC, but still not DROID quality, as they are recorded in the 3GP format at 640x480 resolution and with 23 FPS.

Motorola DEVOUR A555 sample video at 640x480 pixels resolution.





Multimedia:

It will come as no surprise that the DEVOUR comes with the stock Android 1.6 music player. Though there is nothing wrong with it, you can download better music apps from the Android Market, such as Rock On and MixZing. Music playback quality is good, about equal to the DROID, but it sounds a bit louder since the external speaker is angled on the bottom instead of being on the back on the device.



Motorola has reworked the picture gallery and video player so they are now nicer to look at, though it isn’t as graphical as the 3D viewer on Android 2.1. When flipping through pictures, for example, the transition is much like turning a page. The photo viewer allows for picture editing as well, such as RGB, brightness, contrast, color saturation and others, and an auto-fix noticeably touches up images. There is a very cool preview feature where half the picture stays as the original and the other half is adjusted so you can compare the differences. The image can be cropped and rotated, or have the resolution cut down, and you can also select from different color effects or add speech bubbles, clip art, and frame the picture. All-in-all, it offers a lot of handy editing tools that aren’t found on most Verizon phones.



We tested the playback of several videos on the DEVOUR, as it supports MP4 files encoded with H.263 and H.264. Even though the display is physically limited to 480x320 pixels resolution, the device could play videos of up to 720x306 resolution with 1500Kbps bit rate, which was not possible on the HTC DROID ERIS. However, the WVGA display on the Motorola DROID remains the clear winner for watching videos between the three Verizon Android devices.