Welcome to the Phone Arena review of the Motorola i465 Clutch. The clutches Motorola’s first iDEN unit to feature full QWERTY keyboard but beyond that is a basic inimical phone. With just a $39.99 price point or $129.99 on Boost Mobile prepaid, the device is well priced for what it is.
It’s a good size, very basic yet it’s a thin, very rugged Candybar. It does meet Motorola specification for dust, shock and vibration which means it’s going to take a bit more of beating than your traditional phone.
The loud is fairly standard besides it’s a full QWERTY keyboard down below. You have the navigation cluster above that. Motorola still insists on bringing the menu button to the outside. Something that we do not understand.
However, you also have a hard coded speaker phone key and then your traditional D-pad, soft keys, and send and end buttons. The top has a somewhat unique twist to the right side of the display. Here we have shortcut keys for messaging, web and camera.
The left side of phone has a very small volume rocker, the direct connect key and if we open up the port, it also has the Micro USB, charging and data port as well the 2.5 mm headphone jack which also has support for the ring that allows you to do direct connect over wire headset.
The back is very simple. It’s coated and soft touch paint and has a little bit ridging to it. At the top is the VGA camera. The right side of phone, the top and the bottom have nothing. The speaker is actually in this dead space here around the keys.
As we come to expect from iDEN phones it is extremely loud and we have no problems hearing it. Call quality on the phone as a whole is very good as well and for bringing up the main menu, you can see that’s it’s the general same Motorola iDEN menu we’ve seen for years.
There are several pages of main menu, main level icons, something that we’ve always had a gripe with. We do have thing in credit because the system is very customizable. You can change the shortcuts keys, the D-pad keys; you can reorder the menu and bring items in and out of it. Some people really like this customization but on a whole, we think it is too large, too bloated and too clunky.
We long for the day when Motorola goes to a more streamlined interface much like we’ve seen with their Sprint phones. My biggest complain about the 465 is the small display. At just on 1.8 inches and only 128x160 in resolution, it’s pretty poor. A lot of phone these days often are having full QVGA displays and we do not understand why that can't be the norm anymore.
Other than that, for word of this the Clutches are pretty good phone. It’s targeted at people looking for QWERTY and messaging on a cheap and in that respect it delivers.
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