Szadzik
Extreme Android User
So today I finally received my MS2 and would like to share my impressions with those still thinking about upgrading.
1. Build Quality and Physical Appearance:
First of all I have to say I have always like the premium build quality of my MS1 as well as the sliding mechanism, metal case. This phone simply is built like a tank and looks the part of a serious smartphone. Like JKK said in his video review the phone looks and feels like a tool, something built to last.
When I started using my MS2 I have to say I am equally impressed. It is still very sturdy, nice materials used, has a good grip. I have to say though, that I am even happier now, because MS2 offers a few improvements over MS1 here. Number one are buttons for volume, camera and power. They are easier to press and much nicer in touch. The camera button is not gold anymore which I am happy with. The 'chin' at the bottom of the phone is much nicer too. Your finger dose not simply fall off the upper part onto free space below it, not you have a nice 'slope' there. Battery door is even more sturdy and more difficult to take off, which is a good thing for those who do not need to take the battery out/ change SIMs often and bad for those who have a few SIMs and change between them often. As for the sliding mechanism, I would say it is a bit more stiff than my MS1, but that will rpobably change with time. The big improvement is of course the keyboard. I will have to get used to it, but using it now it seems that the added space from removing the dial pad is very beneficial. The only thing I will be missing from MS1's keyboard are the dual Shift and Alt buttons. Moreover, the new phone has been made a bit rounder on the sides and holdign MS2 and MS1 it feels as if MS2 was smaller and thinner, which is not the case as MS2 is taller and wider by a few millimeters.
Overall I have to say I am very happy with the MS2 design.
2. Preinstalled Software:
As we all know (and are not exactly happy about it) Motorola ecided to put their MotoBlur software on the phone.
As I am an avid LauncherPro+ fan I did not even bother trying to use the Blur Launcher, but I had a chance to play with it a bit and it seems to be pretty ok. Since it does not really have any options like LPP I just played with it when I was removing a the widgets Motorola put on the screens. I have to say the most important drawback for me is wallpaper scrolling. I hate this kind of movement and it feels as if the phone was horribly sluggish. Wen I set LPP to not scroll wallapaers it feels much better. Back to Moto software. As you may or may not know all the widgets preinstalled by Motorola are also accessible through other launchers and thus I played with them for some time - I have to say there are a few nice ones. First of all the Date and Time widget. You place it on your screen and since all MotoBlur widgets are resizable you can resize this one too. If you make it small, it will only show date and time, but if you make it bigger it wil also show calendar for the whole month! I really like the resizability of Moto widgets. There are some nice toggle widgets (flightmode, WiFi, GPS) and I did not even install the one I paid for and used to use before, I set the Moto ones and so far I am happy with them. Some other additions are Messaging, Sticky Note, Contact quick tasks and they are all pretty good. I have to admit I do not use them, but I bet there will be people happy with them. Motorola also did a good job adding some extra software apart from what FroYo offers. Alarm and Timer - an alarm nad timer application that offers much easier access to alarms, DLNA, Media Share - these would be the main pieces of software added. Motorola also put in a few extra settings. The more interesting include Ad-Hoc WiFi connection settings, Caller ID Readout, In-Pocket Detection, Data Manager allowing to control how Internet is used to fetch data to various accounts (email, blur etc.), Battery manager with preset and user-configurable battery power saving modes, Zoom mode allowing you to use a zoom-in window, read-out whic makes the phone speak all the button names when you press them. I think especially with the accessibility options to zoom-in and read-out Motorola did a great job. They also added a task manager and a file basic explorer. The task manager even has an auto-kill option, even though I have no idea why someone would want to auto-kill apps having 512MB RAM instead of 256 MS1 had.
Overall I think Motorola put a lot of effort here and for those who do not want to spend hours searching for the basic software for their phone it will be a real time saver.
3. Performance:
I always used my MS1 with root and overclocked it to 900MHz which was a great improvement over the stock 550MHz clock speed. I always thought however, that the biggest flaw of MS1 was the small amount of RAM. There was never enough of it and the phone used to run at around 30MB free RAM at all times, which meant slowdowns from time to time. The biggest slowdown I always experienced was entering settings screen in the Weather Widgets I use. As a test for MS2 I opened Weather Widgets and accessed the settings screen to see if there would be any delay. I noticed that the delay was muuuch shorter and settings opened in 1/4th of the time MS1 used to need. I still need time to see the real change, but looking at all the standard things I do multiple times each day I see an increase in speed.
4. Storage:
Just one word: Uncomparable. With the 8GB memory on-board MS2 just slaughters MS1 where I kept removing stuff and moving as many apps as possible to SD with Titanium Backup. No worrying about that with MS2. Of course there are phones with more storage on the market, but I think even 2GB would be more than enough for user data and apps. Myself, I will never use the internal memory to keep anything apart from apps and movies, because I would be afraid of losing the stuff after a hard reset.
5. Final Words:
Would I upgrade from MS1 to MS2 again? I would with no hesitation.
Is MS2 a phone ready for today's competition? Not sure really if there is any competition in this segment of the Market. Apart from the oldish MS1, MS2 and Desire Z there are no more qwerty phone running Android. I checked Desire Z and the phone is just too big, with no more power or storage than MS2, so for me MS2 is a clear winner here.
I cannot tell you if you should upgrade or not. I am a phone geek and change phones at least once a year without my provider's help. I will wait until spring and wait for those new phones with dual-core CPUs to see how they work or simply go for an Android Tablet like Notion Ink Adam.
BTW., I used z4root and rooted the phone to remove some of the stuff I do not use. No problems with rooting and everything was set up within 2 hours from getting the phone.
1. Build Quality and Physical Appearance:
First of all I have to say I have always like the premium build quality of my MS1 as well as the sliding mechanism, metal case. This phone simply is built like a tank and looks the part of a serious smartphone. Like JKK said in his video review the phone looks and feels like a tool, something built to last.
When I started using my MS2 I have to say I am equally impressed. It is still very sturdy, nice materials used, has a good grip. I have to say though, that I am even happier now, because MS2 offers a few improvements over MS1 here. Number one are buttons for volume, camera and power. They are easier to press and much nicer in touch. The camera button is not gold anymore which I am happy with. The 'chin' at the bottom of the phone is much nicer too. Your finger dose not simply fall off the upper part onto free space below it, not you have a nice 'slope' there. Battery door is even more sturdy and more difficult to take off, which is a good thing for those who do not need to take the battery out/ change SIMs often and bad for those who have a few SIMs and change between them often. As for the sliding mechanism, I would say it is a bit more stiff than my MS1, but that will rpobably change with time. The big improvement is of course the keyboard. I will have to get used to it, but using it now it seems that the added space from removing the dial pad is very beneficial. The only thing I will be missing from MS1's keyboard are the dual Shift and Alt buttons. Moreover, the new phone has been made a bit rounder on the sides and holdign MS2 and MS1 it feels as if MS2 was smaller and thinner, which is not the case as MS2 is taller and wider by a few millimeters.
Overall I have to say I am very happy with the MS2 design.
2. Preinstalled Software:
As we all know (and are not exactly happy about it) Motorola ecided to put their MotoBlur software on the phone.
As I am an avid LauncherPro+ fan I did not even bother trying to use the Blur Launcher, but I had a chance to play with it a bit and it seems to be pretty ok. Since it does not really have any options like LPP I just played with it when I was removing a the widgets Motorola put on the screens. I have to say the most important drawback for me is wallpaper scrolling. I hate this kind of movement and it feels as if the phone was horribly sluggish. Wen I set LPP to not scroll wallapaers it feels much better. Back to Moto software. As you may or may not know all the widgets preinstalled by Motorola are also accessible through other launchers and thus I played with them for some time - I have to say there are a few nice ones. First of all the Date and Time widget. You place it on your screen and since all MotoBlur widgets are resizable you can resize this one too. If you make it small, it will only show date and time, but if you make it bigger it wil also show calendar for the whole month! I really like the resizability of Moto widgets. There are some nice toggle widgets (flightmode, WiFi, GPS) and I did not even install the one I paid for and used to use before, I set the Moto ones and so far I am happy with them. Some other additions are Messaging, Sticky Note, Contact quick tasks and they are all pretty good. I have to admit I do not use them, but I bet there will be people happy with them. Motorola also did a good job adding some extra software apart from what FroYo offers. Alarm and Timer - an alarm nad timer application that offers much easier access to alarms, DLNA, Media Share - these would be the main pieces of software added. Motorola also put in a few extra settings. The more interesting include Ad-Hoc WiFi connection settings, Caller ID Readout, In-Pocket Detection, Data Manager allowing to control how Internet is used to fetch data to various accounts (email, blur etc.), Battery manager with preset and user-configurable battery power saving modes, Zoom mode allowing you to use a zoom-in window, read-out whic makes the phone speak all the button names when you press them. I think especially with the accessibility options to zoom-in and read-out Motorola did a great job. They also added a task manager and a file basic explorer. The task manager even has an auto-kill option, even though I have no idea why someone would want to auto-kill apps having 512MB RAM instead of 256 MS1 had.
Overall I think Motorola put a lot of effort here and for those who do not want to spend hours searching for the basic software for their phone it will be a real time saver.
3. Performance:
I always used my MS1 with root and overclocked it to 900MHz which was a great improvement over the stock 550MHz clock speed. I always thought however, that the biggest flaw of MS1 was the small amount of RAM. There was never enough of it and the phone used to run at around 30MB free RAM at all times, which meant slowdowns from time to time. The biggest slowdown I always experienced was entering settings screen in the Weather Widgets I use. As a test for MS2 I opened Weather Widgets and accessed the settings screen to see if there would be any delay. I noticed that the delay was muuuch shorter and settings opened in 1/4th of the time MS1 used to need. I still need time to see the real change, but looking at all the standard things I do multiple times each day I see an increase in speed.
4. Storage:
Just one word: Uncomparable. With the 8GB memory on-board MS2 just slaughters MS1 where I kept removing stuff and moving as many apps as possible to SD with Titanium Backup. No worrying about that with MS2. Of course there are phones with more storage on the market, but I think even 2GB would be more than enough for user data and apps. Myself, I will never use the internal memory to keep anything apart from apps and movies, because I would be afraid of losing the stuff after a hard reset.
5. Final Words:
Would I upgrade from MS1 to MS2 again? I would with no hesitation.
Is MS2 a phone ready for today's competition? Not sure really if there is any competition in this segment of the Market. Apart from the oldish MS1, MS2 and Desire Z there are no more qwerty phone running Android. I checked Desire Z and the phone is just too big, with no more power or storage than MS2, so for me MS2 is a clear winner here.
I cannot tell you if you should upgrade or not. I am a phone geek and change phones at least once a year without my provider's help. I will wait until spring and wait for those new phones with dual-core CPUs to see how they work or simply go for an Android Tablet like Notion Ink Adam.
BTW., I used z4root and rooted the phone to remove some of the stuff I do not use. No problems with rooting and everything was set up within 2 hours from getting the phone.
