Motorola Pro+ (Pro Plus) Review by 3G.co.uk

If you like a good physical keyboard on your mobile, but don’t want a BlackBerry, Motorola has just come up with a new choice for you, in the shape of the Motorola Pro Plus. Unlike Motorola’s flip phone the Gleam Plus, the Pro Plus offers you the benefits both of that keyboard and the many thousands of Android apps that are to be had.

Looking at it, the Pro Plus is going to get compared with a BlackBerry, thanks to the physical keyboard and its solid, curvy design. However, it also has a touchscreen, and while BlackBerry failed to combine the two well on its Bold 9790, on the Pro Plus it seems like a great combination.

Old news

Your first job when you fire up the device is to initiate your MOTOBLUR account. This will back up preferences and contacts, and is intended to make it easier to swap phones – but only if you’re changing to another Motorola handset.

Motorola has chosen to let the Pro Plus run Android Gingerbread, with a few Motorola personalisations thrown in for good measure. There are seven desktops that can be customised with your choice of widgets, apps and bookmarks. There are some Motorola widgets included too, such as social networking and email. However, as we were unable to get them to stream content for us they were a bit of a waste of time.

But we liked the other Motorola touches – including the new-look dialler – which add a new feel to the rather jaded Gingerbread operating system.

Text talk

We’re also pretty keen on that physical keyboard. If you’re texting for instance, it’s a speedy process, thanks to the keys, which are raised in the middle to make them easy to find with your thumb. Made a mistake? No problem, the autocorrect facility shows you a list of options at the bottom of the display. Tap on the word you really meant to type and carry on.

The keyboard is well laid out too – there are comma and full stop keys as well as a useful Alt key to take you to punctuation and numbers. There’s also a very handy dedicated ‘@’ key. 

Under the display are the Android touch buttons for Home, Menu, Search and Back. There’s also a line of virtual shortcuts along the base of the display, which take you to texts, camera, apps and contact

s. We’re happy to see a camera shortcut, but it does come at the expense of a shortcut to your emails.

Power-wise, the Pro Plus performed well. We tried it with a selection of the latest games, such as Temple Run, and it coped marvellously, with no signs of slowing down or any other issues. Streaming video is pretty good too, although we did experience the odd stutter – however that may well have been related to the network rather than the phone itself.

Screen star

The display, which measures 3.1 inches, is really bright – it means that even if viewing it in direct sunlight it is easy to read emails and texts – and images and videos are full of colour and pin sharp. HD videos look particularly impressive.

At 3.1 inches, though, the screen is a little small if you want to watch a full movie, and you’ll find yourself doing a lot of zooming and scrolling if you’re browsing the web. However, once you get used to the size of the screen, the online experience is enjoyable – it responds well to touch controls and you can scroll though pages easily as scrolling is adjusted depending on how aggressive your gestures are. We experienced no issues or lag while surfing the net either. 

Playing snap

There is a five-megapixel snapper, which is fine for taking daytime snaps – they look sharp and okay colour-wise if you want to view them on a monitor or TV, but you’ll probably find yourself having to brighten them up to get the best out of them. An LED flash is included for taking low-light shots, but it had a habit of overexposing the subjects. There is a facility for capturing 720p video too, and this came out well, adjusting to any variation in light and picking up voices clearly.

The battery lasted really well – even after a full day undergoing heavy use (playing games and streaming video), the battery still had life left in it. This is thanks to the battery manager onboard, which lets you choose from several modes depending on whether you want to conserve your juice or get the ultimate performance from your handset. It is also possible to set up a custom battery setting, where you can alter screen brightness and switch off some services at off-peak times. It’s a nice addition and we’d like to see it appear on more phones.

Our conclusion

The Pro Plus is a winner, with its neat combination of usable keyboard and responsive display. If you like a physical keyboard, you’ll be typing in texts and emails speedily, while the display lets you find your way around the web and make the most of the many thousands of Android apps. The small display is not the perfect option for surfing the net or watching feature-length movies, and the Gingerbread OS is starting to look a bit jaded, but nevertheless if you’re looking for a viable alternative to a BlackBerry, the Motorola Pro Plus is it.