World's First Push-To-Talk Rugged Android Smartphone – Motorola i1

The Motorola i1 is the first Android iDEN model and the world’s first Android-powered Nextel Direct Connect smartphone. It is a hardened smartphone, and is described as military grade certified against blowing rain, dust, shock, vibration, temperatures, etc. Key features include the capacitive touchscreen at a large 3.1 inches, an accelerometer (good for the games available in the growing Android Market), WiFi, a 5 megapixel camera that offers panoramic mode, GPS navigation, Swype text entry, support for Exchange, and a memory card slot with support for up to 32GB. Of course, being a Direct Connect smartphone, it allows for instant, one-to-one push-to-talk communication nationwide with any other Nextel Direct Connect subscriber. There’s even a push-to-talk toggle option that allows for multitasking so you can view emails, messages and more while talking. This can be a real plus, especially since it’s so easy to view Microsoft Office files with this phone.

The phone itself is sleek at just 4.65 inches x 2.28 inches by 0.5 inches. While it feels sturdy in hand, it’s not heavy at just 4.63 ounces. It has the typical Android phone buttons, and a large easy to use navigational pad. The HVGA 320x480 pixels touchscreen is nice, the colors look rich and text appears sharp.

The phone comes with Opera Mobile web browser, which is quite easy to use and loads most pages in a reasonable time frame and without losing the page’s layout. There’s no support for pinch-to-zoom, but you can double-tap the screen to zoom in on a page. Motorola wanted to build the iDEN or push-to-talk functionality on an established operating system, the phone runs on Android 1.5 rather than the latest version. That does, unfortunately, limit some of the apps from the Android market that can run on the phone. The Motorola i1 also has stereo Bluetooth and Adobe Flash Lite.

Overall, the Motorola i1 is a push-to-talk smartphone that has a sophisticated look, offers an OS with lots of versatility, has decent controls and great protection against environmental conditions. The call quality and reception are excellent and the speakerphone is loud. The multimedia is above par and users can enjoy the growing Android Market.

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