NOT “SMART,” BUT FAR FROM STUPID

Tired of tapping out terse text messages on a standard keypad, but don’t need the full-on functionality of a Smartphone? Motorola’s tri-band handy stakes out a midpoint between an ordinary cell phone and a wireless PDA.

FLIP IT

You know those teen movies where the nerd girl takes off her glasses and all of a sudden she’s hot? That’s the A630 in a nutshell. With a chunky, candy bar profile it doesn’t look like much: just a solid little tri-band phone with a bright blue three-line LCD display and zoom less, VGA camera. But flip it open and – cue the music! – suddenly you’re text messaging, IMing and emailing with a  QWERTY keyboard and 65,000-color screen.

TWO THUMBS UP

The A630 performed well as a phone on a recent LA to NY road trip, with enough talk (3 hours, according to the manual) and standby (212 hours) time to get us through a longer-than-expected layover in Chicago (hi, ATA! Hate you!). The built-in Bluetooth supports most new headsets, and easily made a wireless love connection with our Toshiba Qosmio laptop.

But the thumb-sized keyboard was a real revelation. All of a sudden our text messages read like coherent thoughts, instead of the strange staccato poetry fired off from standard handsets with predictive text input. The A630 also supports POP3, SMTP, and IMAP4 mail, as well as ICQ, Yahoo and AOL instant messenger.

NOT QUITE THE WHOLE WORLD IN YOUR HANDS

So is it everything you’d ever need in a handheld? No, and it isn’t trying to be. With only 5 MB of onboard memory, the A630 can’t handle a power user’s daily email traffic. The GPRS data connection is fine for WAP browsing, but this is not a web phone. If you need a Smartphone, get a Smartphone. But if all you really want is a reliable phone with awesome text-messaging features – and a side order of ooh-ah factor – then give the A630 a try.