Motorola Motoluxe review

Poor hardware meets dull design in this middling Android 2.3 smartphone

Motorola Motoluxe review
This Android 2.3 smartphone has an 8MP camera, but lacks processing power

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Battery

The battery powering the Motorola Motoluxe is a Li-Ion 1400mAh that, coupled with the low processing unit, means you ought to get a good amount of time out of this.

Motorola quotes talk time of around 6.5 hours, and you do get a little longer than that, if all you're doing is using a few light apps, playing a few games, using a little Wi-Fi and making a few calls and texts. With that sort of usage, you'll easily make the battery life last into the night.

But making good use of the video player, the Wi-Fi and the internet-based apps, we drained the battery in four hours easily. In fact, there were few days when we didn't have to top up the charge before the day was done.

Motorola Motoluxe review

That's pretty standard for a juice-draining dual-core smartphone such as the Apple iPhone 4S, but for something so middling as the Motorola Motoluxe, it seemed to need excessive charging.

Connectivity

3G (HSDPA 900 / 2100), HSDPA, 7.2Mbps, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n (plus hotspot) and Bluetooth mean the Motorola Motoluxe is a well-connected mid-range Android phone.

There is a DLNA client on board, the useful MediaSee app, although all video from the DLNA-enabled devices we could stream from failed to play. Audio worked just fine, however.

Motorola Motoluxe review

You can also tether using USB. It delivered predictably dire speeds, but it did indeed deliver them, which is something if you desperately need an internet connection and all you have is your phone.

When you connect to a PC via a USB cable, the Motorola PC Synchronisation Tool automatically prompts an installation. It's not a full-blown PC suite by any stretch though, so to edit the files you'll have to simply drag and drop.