The Lady Geek’s Doodad of the Day

Sprint’s Motorola Photon 4G

Okay first let’s get the practicalities of this lovely little handset out of the way. Sprint’s Motorola Photon 4G is a sharp little doodad for your smart phone needs. The sleek 2.6 x 4.9 x .048 design, octagonal shape and weight of 5.57oz makes it the “little black dress” of handsets in my book. The octagonal shape makes it unique enough for my eclectic tastes, but there’s even more to love about it, such as its multitouch diagonal display of 4.3inches with a resolution of 960 x 540 pixels. 
The Photon ships out running Android’s Gingerbread release (2.3) platform, has an 8 MP camera, HD quality video capabilities and front facing camera. Internally, it features an Nvidia Tegra 2 dual core processor, an additional 1GB of RAM, 16GB internal storage, accepts mico SD cards up to 32GB’s. So as far as power processing and storage, it’s a handy little handset to have.

The Bad

Before I go further into what I love about my phone, let me tell you about some of the let downs I’ve experienced. First of all I love taking pictures, I’m not a photographer per se, but as the mother of four children with access to one of the largest and loveliest parks in Philadelphia, pictures are a particular passion of mine. My first thought when I initially read the specs on the Photon 4G, was “Wow, HD pictures and videos? Great! I can leave my camera at home occasionally and still grab pretty wonderful pictures whenever I have the need.” Boy was I disappointed. The pictures, unless it’s an extremely bright place that we’re in at the time are dark and most of my videos came out with a decidedly bluish tint to them. Overall, the camera is good enough for the family barbeque but I’ll stick with my camera when it comes time for the family portraits.

The other bad thing and it’s only slightly bad, is that while the Photon 4G is quite fast on scrolling through menus and opening apps, it experiences some lag when I scroll through my home screens, particularly when I have active widgets. It’s not bad enough to shut the phone off, but it is slightly annoying when I’m trying to get through to a different screen in a hurry.
Finally, the phone, while definitely a sexy handset, is slightly bigger than my hand, making it difficult to carry on long conversations without a headset. In the phone’s defense, with the exception of the baby of the family, all of my children’s hands are wider and longer than mine so that was kind of to be expected.

The Good

Today, I’m all into sharing the love I have for my new Motorola Photon 4G. It’s easy to use, plays my games smoothly and the web browsing is exactly what you’d expect over 4G, which is to say fast. Even when faced with pages loaded in desktop version images, it has very little trouble. My videos stream without buffering and my screen is very responsive.
I love the artistry of the design. Motorola decided to cut the edges off of the handset and the result, as I’ve already stated, was sexy. It’s a tough phone, the screen is made of scratch resistant Gorilla Glass, which, let me tell you, is very handy when dealing with self clumsiness and two year olds. The Photon 4G also includes a handy little kickstand that switches the view to landscape as it supports the phone while it plays my videos or slideshows.

Final Thoughts

Overall, the Motorola 4G is one of the best phones I’ve used this year. It’s a one of a kind design, utilizing a great processor that meshes well with Sprint’s 4G network in the Android Platform so smoothly; I do believe this was worth the $200 price tag.

Written by Maryann Paris