Motorola Motoyuva A810

The A810 is the most affordable of the cellphones in this test but it’s not apparent at first glance. A sturdily built device with an all metal body and a smooth finish, the A810 has black and dark gray tones.The front is very clean with a minimal layout consisting of a large call button and a 5-way navigation button that acts like a joystick. The call buttons offer minimal feedback and feel a little tacky. The joystick feels smooth to use and glides through the menus easily. The volume button on the left side is a long two-way affair and it quite hard to use owing to almost no button travel and poor feedback. Even the camera button located on the other side is hard.Below this, there is a hold switch which is functional. The touch interface is decent and the phone cannot be called a slouch, although the multimedia menu functions aren’t the quickest around. Thankfully a 3.5-mm jack is provided so your headphones can be used. The font used for its inteface, along with its menus are basic but very readable and the display is good; although not ideal for video playback. One of the first major gripes we had was with the on-screen keyboard was that it’s not good enough for typing fast, or with much accuracy. The alphabets are small and the keypad is a little too congested. We’d have loved a slide-out hardware keypad but that seems too much to ask at this price point.

Motorola provides a camera but its little more than a cosmetic addition and not usable. Performance in the signal tests was strictly so-so and this phone has a good headset. The fact that you can use other earphones for music is also a plus and it makes the device a decent music phone; not ideal though going by its multimedia menu and output quality. It was the only phone that didn’t have support for Bluetooth 2.0, although it does support A2DP. On the whole this Motorola is a solidly built device with no other quirks than what one might expect given the phone’s price point. If Motorola designed a better on-screen keyboard and offered a good 3.2-megapixel camera with this phone we’d heartily recommend it at Rs. 8,399.