Motorola Rival A455 Review

Software and Features:

The main menu of the Motorola Rival A455 doesn’t contain anything out of the ordinary and has categories for media center, messaging, contacts, recent calls, and settings & tools.  Only three themes are included, Urban, White, and Ice Cream, with the last one being the most animated and colorful.  There are also options to change the menu layout between tab, list and grid view, select you own wallpaper, and change the clock format.



The 1000 entry phonebook is also pretty standard as it allows you to enter a person’s name, 5 phone numbers and 2 email addresses, as well as selecting a ringtone and picture for CallerID.  Once a contacted is stored, you can assign them to one of 93 available speed dial locations.



Pictures taken outside during the day by the 2MP camera are slightly below average as images look generally washed-out.   Images taken by the 3MP camera on the enV3 completely blow away the Motorola Rival A455 in every aspect.  Even the 2MP cameras on the Alias 2 and Nokia Intrigue do a better job.  Based upon this, it is not hard to imagine that inside images taken by the Rival look even worse.  Due to the Rival’s below average camera quality, we can’t see anyone using it for more than grabbing quick “on the go” pictures.






One area where the Rival did quite well was with the music playback quality, even though the device still uses the outdated “red” Verizon player.  Music through the rear speaker was nice and loud (even though you have to flip the phone over) and the quality was about equal to that of the enV Touch, despite it not having stereo speakers.  This is a nice improvement over the Motorola Rapture we reviewed last year, which demonstrated poor music quality.  You can also listen to music through a Stereo Bluetooth headset or by connecting wired earbuds to the 3.5mm headset jack, which we always like to see.

Other software features include Mobile Web, VCast Music downloads, VCast Video streaming, and VZ Navigator for GPS guided directions.  You can also download a wide variety of games and other programs using the Media Center.  Applications open fast and there is no noticeable delay when using them.  The web browser is similar to the one used on the Alias 2 and Casio Exilim, as it dissects large web sites into smaller pages that you have to click through.  Even though this is more user friendly than the browsers found on the Motorola Rapture, W755 or V9m, it still can’t rival the HTML browser used by the enV3 or enV Touch, as those maintain the integrity of the page layout.

There is a total of 178MB of internal memory, out of which 46MB is used, leaving 132MB available to the consumer.  This is one of the few areas the Motorola Rival A455 does better than the enV3, which only has 90MB of available memory.  However, the Rival can only accept up to 8GB memory cards where the enV3 and Alias 2 can take up to 16GB memory cards.