Motorola Spice deals & review

The Motorola Spice offers a combination of touch sensitive screen and compacted QWERTY keyboard, but takes a different approach to most Motorola QWERTY phones (such as the Milestone 2). The keyboard does not slide-out from the side but instead comes from below in a manner befitting of older generation slider phones. The keyboard is a compacted down QWERTY pad very reminiscent of a typical BlackBerry handset, and in many ways the Spice is similar to RIM´s latest hit phone the BlackBerry Torch.

One of the interesting things about the Spice is that it features an optical trackpad, much like BlackBerry phones, but rather than placing it under the screen it is on the rear side of the phone. Known as Backtrack, this trackpad allows you to navigate the phone´s interface while at the same time leaving your hands free to touch the screen or press buttons on the keypad. The Spice comes with Motoblur on top of Android Éclair (2.1). While this version of Android is getting on a bit now it is probably fairly suitable for a phone of the Spice´s nature, and the Motoblur interface still comes with plenty of benefits of its own such as excellent social networking integration.

The Spice´s screen is slightly smaller than most touchscreens at just 3", although this is understandable considering the nature of the sliding keypad. The screen is capacitive so it comes with multitouch input, and the Spice also features an accelerometer and proximity sensor.

The featured camera on the Spice is not particularly amazing at 3.15 megapixels, but does come with some nice extra features such as geo-tagging, 5x zoom and VGA video recording. Unfortunately this camera does not come with a flash so photography is realistically limited to daylight conditions only. The Spice has 100MB internal storage and up to 32GB of storage space with microSD cards for you to store media, including music and video to play on the phone. The Spice comes with Adobe Flash Lite allowing to stream online video content and there is also a YouTube app. Additionally, there is an FM radio for you to listen to the latest music, although this does not come with RDS support.

You can access the internet through the included Android WebKit browser, and the Spice comes with 3G HSDPA and Wi-Fi to assist you in this. Various Bluetooth profiles are available including A2DP, allowing you to make use of wireless headphones.

In many respects the Spice is similar to the popular BlackBerry Torch and if you had been considering purchasing the latter device it may be worth your time taking a look at the Spice, as in some areas it outperforms its RIM rival while at the same time coming in a more affordable package.