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(More customer reviews)If you want a smart phone, keep looking. If you want a low cost phone that is fairly small and has a qwerty keyboard for texting this may be a good one to look at. I bought mine direct from Motorola, so it has a warranty unlike the one this review is attached to. It is an unlocked phone and has no contractual obligations, which is great if your old phone has died and you need a new one. Or if you want to take advantage of T-Mobile's "even more plus" plan.
When the phone arrived I inserted my wife's SIM card and was able to make calls in just a minute or two. The only thing that wasn't totally clear was how to get it to show the SIM card contacts. (Open the Phone book app, make a phony contact, if you haven't made a real one yet, select options, scroll to and select view, and select SIM, or Phone and SIM. Done.)
The FM radio only works if you have a wired headset connected, the cable is the antenna. It did display the station call sign and the song titles from the radio, a nice little touch. Also there are only 9 presets for FM stations, you can scroll through them with the side arrow keys. Reception was good, and so was quality of sound. The only thing that was a little annoying was this: If you press the select (center) button it will start recording off air. I guess that would be great if you were trying to capture a song off the air, but if you are just trying to close it and hit the button you could end up with a lot of wasted space on your SIM card. The specs say it will take a 32GB micro SDHC, I have a 16GB on order and think that it should do fine for some songs and some pictures.
I had a micro USB cable from another device and the first time I plugged it in and opened Windows media player 11 it was ready to sync. I dragged an album in to the sync list hit the button and it started working. It's probably more a comment on WMP11 than the phone, but I noticed that some songs were converting on the fly, and it would read ahead 3 or 4 songs and start the conversion so that it could sync quicker. it did import the artist, album and other info from WMP and you can sort by it which is nice.
The keyboard is the main reason we got this phone and it is worth it. The buttons are slightly raised and easy to feel and use. The predictive text suits my wife just fine, since her last phone was a Motorola too. The only quibble I have with them is on the faceplate the option/back/delete/mail buttons are a little too small and you will use the first two a lot. If they were equal in size to the call/end buttons it would look more symmetrical and work better.
The screen is nice and bright, with good resolution. The text seems to be almost too big, which is a compliment. I hate phones with tiny text that I have to get right up to my older eyes.
Summary, if you want the latest, greatest whiz bang phone this isn't it. If you want a decent smallish phone with a qwerty keyboard and a few other nice little touches then this may be just what you need. I intend to get 2 more for the teenagers when theirs get used up. I do give it bonus points for using a standard USB cable, even if it isn't the most common (mini USB) standard, you can still get cables for it at any electronics store, and they don't have to be thrown away as soon as the phone bites the dust. Also it gets bonus points for using a standard 3.5 mm jack for the headphones. You can get the $300 Ultimate Ears or the $6 gummy's, not what the manufacturer picked and put their unique end on.
P.S. I called T-Mobile for help with the SIM card contacts. They were very helpful and worked with me for a fair bit of time. They did not have any data on this phone, and their scripts don't help at all. But we did get the problems solved and they were very willing to keep trying until it worked. I say this for two points. 1. Don't be afraid to buy this phone because it doesn't come from your carrier, T-mobile will still help you with it if you need help. If I had a new SIM card with no contacts to dig out I would not have needed to call, it just worked as soon as I put the sim card in and let it getregistered with the network. 2. T-mobile was agnostic about me buying my own phone and setting it up on their network. I was a little reluctant to call, thinking they would tell me to take a hike with my non supported (no profit to them) phone, they didn't. They did their best and solved the problems, minor as they were, and seemed willing to work as long as it took to get everything working to my satisfaction. Your mileage may vary with a different carrier.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Motorola Motocubo A45 ECO Unlocked Quad-Band GSM phone with 2MP camera, Full QWERTY keyboard, Bluetooth and FM radio - International Version with No Warranty (White)
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