A box containing a collection of fancy new Verizon 3G smartphones arrived to our office last week for testing.  The Palm pixi + pre were quickly snatched up by my colleagues and I was given the opportunity to review the Motorola Devour.  Having little, if any experience with smartphones I was thrilled for a week with internet on the go and a much needed break from T9 predictive text.

Despite my initial excitement, the novelty of having a more sophisticated device quickly wore off.  My main issue with the Devour is the device’s uncomfortable size and half-baked design.  The screen seems rather undersized for the devices face and the touch sensitivity left much to be desired. 

I did enjoy the social integration capability of Motoblur.  All of my facebook and gmail contacts were automatically synced to my phone, but I found the default “happenings” widgets to be rather useless. 

I preferred the hardware snap-out qwerty over the unresponsive touchscreen keyboard.  The buttons were satisfactory and I was soon hacking out text messages much faster than my previous flip phone allowed.

The bottom line on this phone… it’s not for the beginner.  While I will miss having access to features like GPS, email and a range of applications like Yelp and Google maps, the large & klutzy nature of this phone left me feeling frustrated.  I was more than happy to ship this right on back to Verizon and fire up the flip phone once again. 

While my next cell will certainly be a smart phone, it needs to be a device that feels right, has responsive input and features that not just suffice but downright impress!  So my challenge to Motorola, if you want to do something… do it right.