Motorola Rival (silver, Verizon Wireless)
Manufacturer: Motorola Part number: 9370888
- More product information:
- Editors' review
- User reviews
- Specifications
- Product series
- Accessories
- Manufacturer info
- Bottom Line:
- Though we like the Motorola Rival's features, its poor design keeps us from recommending it.
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Where to buy
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CNET editors' review
Motorola Rival (silver, Verizon Wireless) price range: $0.00 - $299.99
- Reviewed by: Nicole Lee
- Reviewed on: 06/24/2009
The good: The Motorola Rival offers a slew of multimedia features and good call quality.
The bad: The Motorola Rival's navigation controls are poorly designed. Also, it has a lackluster display.
The bottom line: Though we like the Motorola Rival's features, its poor design keeps us from recommending it.
Motorola has been hard at work lately, introducing new messaging phones. Besides the recent Motorola Clutch and the Motorola Hint, the company also just released the Motorola Rival, available from Verizon Wireless. Offering multimedia features and high-speed EV-DO, the Rival has a similar shape to the LG Neon, with its sideways keyboard and touch-sensitive number keypad, but its design is significantly less refined. The Rival is available for $99.99 after a two-year service agreement and a $50 rebate.
Design
The Motorola Rival has a rather boring, industrial look, with a rectangular shape and slightly curved corners. The outer shell comes in either tin silver or purple, though it's accented with hints of black and red. Measuring 3.8 inches long by 2 inches wide by 0.71 inch deep, the Rival is quite compact, and at 4.4 ounces, it has a nice heft when held in the hand. The sliding mechanism is smooth yet sturdy.
The Rival has a glossy, black finish and a 2.2-inch display. It supports only 65,000 colors and has a 176x220 resolution, which results in a rather lackluster display. You can set up the backlight time, the brightness, the display themes, the menu layout, the dial fonts, the menu font size, the clock format, and whether to show toggle shortcuts on the home screen.
Like the LG Neon, the Rival's display acts as a touch screen for the phone dialer only. Press the phone dialer key on the navigation array, and a virtual number keypad will show up on the display. You can then dial a number by tapping the digits on the screen--there's even vibrating feedback whenever your touch registers.
Underneath the display is the navigation array, which consists of two touch-sensitive soft keys (they're indicated by two tiny lights on the left and the right), the aforementioned phone dialer key, the back key, a four-way circular toggle, and the Send and End/Power keys. There's an additional touch-sensitive soft key on the top left of the display, also indicated by a tiny light, which is only activated when the display is in landscape mode. The circular toggle can be mapped to three user-defined shortcuts for the up, left, and down directions, and the right direction leads to a My Shortcuts menu that lists up to four additional shortcuts.
We weren't pleased with the navigation array overall. The physical keys are flat, stiff, and hard to press, plus you couldn't adjust the touch sensitivity of the soft keys. What's more, because the soft keys are touch-sensitive, we had to keep disabling the screen lock on the phone in order to use them.
Slide the phone sideways and you'll reveal a full QWERTY keyboard on the left side. The display will change orientation automatically from portrait to landscape mode. The keyboard is quite spacious and the keys are raised above the surface, but they're a little stiff when pressed. There are dedicated keys for instant messaging, a new text message, and even an emoticon key.
On the left side of the phone are the volume rocker, the speakerphone key, and a charger jack, and the 3.5 millimeter headset jack, a screen lock key, a voice command key, and camera key are on the right. The camera lens and external speaker are on the back of the phone.
Features
The Motorola Rival comes with a generous 1,000-entry phone book, with room in each entry for five phone numbers and two e-mail addresses. You can then organize the contacts into caller groups, pair them with a photo for caller ID, or any of 30 polyphonic ringtones. Other basics include a vibrate mode, a speakerphone, text and multimedia messaging, voice messaging, a calendar, an alarm clock, a world clock, a stopwatch, a calculator, a notepad, and a tip calculator.
More-advanced users will like the instant messenger support (AIM, Windows Live, and Yahoo), GPS with VZ Navigator support, USB mass storage, the wireless Web browser, and voice command dialing. It also supports a full range of Bluetooth profiles, like hands-free, stereo, dial-up networking, basic printing, file transfer, and more. You also get a variety of e-mail options: mobile e-mail, mobile Web e-mail, and corporate e-mail. Mobile e-mail is a $5 application with which you can get your mail delivered directly to you from a variety of service providers, while mobile Web e-mail is a free service that simply gives you shortcut access to Web e-mail sites like Windows Live and Yahoo Mail. The corporate e-mail option requires a $9.99 monthly subscription to RemoSync, which works with Microsoft ActiveSync to sync your e-mail and your work address book as well.
The Motorola Rival comes with EV-DO, and along with that is Verizon's array of broadband services like V Cast Video, with which you can watch streaming-video content from providers like CBS (Editors' note: CNET Reviews is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS ) and CNN, and V Cast Music with Rhapsody, where you can purchase and download music over the air. Each song costs $1.99, which includes a download to your PC.
The music player itself is housed within the V Cast Music interface, so it feels a little clunky. You can create and edit your own playlists and you can set the songs on repeat or shuffle. You can also sync your songs from your PC with a USB cable using the V Cast Music with Rhapsody software. If you have a Rhapsody subscription, you can load your subscribed tracks to the Rival. The Rival supports up to 8GB of removable memory via a microSD card.
The Rival has a 2.0-megapixel camera, which can take pictures in five resolutions (1,600x1,200, 1,280x960, 640x480, 320x240, and a picture ID mode). Other settings include brightness, white balance, color effects, fun frames, self-timer, three shutter sounds, and a silent option. Photo quality was quite disappointing. Pictures looked very dark and overcast, though they weren't too blurry. There's also a built-in camcorder with settings similar to the still camera's. It can take videos in short, medium, MMS, or maximum storage durations in either 320x240 or 176x144 resolution.
You have a few personalization options with the Motorola Rival. You can change the wallpaper, display themes, and alert tones, and you can get more via the wireless Web browser. It also comes with a few games like 5th Grader 2009 and Pac-Man, and you can get more of those via the Verizon store.
Performance
We tested the dual-band (CDMA 800/1900; EV-DO) Motorola Rival in San Francisco using Verizon Wireless. We were impressed with the call quality. Callers heard us without any static or interference, and we could hear them loud and clear. They said our voices sounded natural. Even when we activated the speakerphone, they couldn't tell the difference. On our end, the speakerphone had plenty of volume, though it sounded a little muffled and tinny at times.
The audio quality of songs from the Motorola Rival's speakers wasn't so great. It's loud enough, but the overall quality was tinny, lacking in bass, and weak. We would recommend using a wired or stereo Bluetooth headset for better music quality. Since the Rival comes with a 3.5 millimeter headset jack, you can use your regular headphones to listen to tunes.
We were pleased with the EV-DO speeds on the Rival. We downloaded a 1.5MB song in around 50 seconds, and loading simple WAP pages took only a few seconds. V Cast videos had little to no buffering. The quality wasn't that great, though: streaming video had a lot of pixelation, especially in action sequences. The low color resolution on the display didn't help, either.
The Motorola Rival has a rated battery life of 5.3 hours talk time and 21.25 days standby time. The tested talk time wasn't too different at 5 hours and 54 minutes. According to FCC radiation tests, the Rival has a digital SAR rating of 1.59 watts per kilogram.User reviews
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Great Phone For Any Texter
by atvrider125 on July 6, 2009
Pros: full qwerty keyboard, the letters are pretty spaced out so it s comfortable to text, and if you want to send an emoticon, you just press the button, and it comes up. it also has a nice touch dial pad. small and portable
Cons: the touch screen numbers are a little too sensitive when you put it to your ear to talk
Summary: bottom line is this is a great phone for anything. great full qwerty keypad, nice clear number touch dial pad display, very small and portable.
Summary: bottom line is this is a great phone for anything. great full qwerty keypad, nice clear number touch dial pad display, very small and portable.
3 out of 3 users found this user opinion helpful.
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Much Better Than I Expected! Great Phone!
by Dant312 on July 15, 2009
Pros: -Small and just really cute!
-Semi-touch screen surprisingly really nice!
-Keyboard is really easy to use.
-GREAT FOR TEXTING (like i do 24/7)
-Tons of great features.
-Threaded (chat-like) texts.
-Holds 500 messages!
-BATTER LASTS DAYS!
-FUN!Cons: -kinda laggy at times when doing things fast. (nothing a software update cant handle)
-screen a little to ... blehh (lcd screen is lacking colors)
-default font sucks! :(2 out of 2 users found this user opinion helpful.
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editor's review is incorrect about camera...
Pros: fun phone... nothing to add that the others haven't already said...
Cons: the screen... serviceable, at best, but I do believe it will last through two years in my pocket... something I don't trust of some of the more fancy screens.
Summary: basically a beginner full keyboard phone that is probably too small to really text alot...
editor's review incorrectly states there is no self portrait mirror... open the silder, there ...Summary: basically a beginner full keyboard phone that is probably too small to really text alot...
editor's review incorrectly states there is no self portrait mirror... open the silder, there it is... and I find it actually is easier to use the camera with the phone open with long and skinny fingers... not sure how others will like it.1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful.
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Great phone for kids
by threehook on July 6, 2009
Pros: Very simple to use. Great graphics. Sturdy. Cheap.
Cons: Haven't found any as of yet. Maybe more colors...
Summary: I bought this phone as an "upgrade" to my sons Amigo cell phone. He is 10 years old and the Amigo although good for when he was 5 - 10 (...
Summary: I bought this phone as an "upgrade" to my sons Amigo cell phone. He is 10 years old and the Amigo although good for when he was 5 - 10 (he had it with him because my mother is deaf and if there was an emergency he could call one of 4 #'s or 911 or if I needed to get a hold of him, I could) unfortunately he has outgrown the Amigo. The Rival has been great for him, easy to use, seems sturdy. I like how it slides as oppsed to flips open due to the fact it'll be a little harder to break. The clarity of the sound is really good too. We got ours at Best Buy for $19.99 so I won't be too upset if it gets lost, stolen or broken.
1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful.
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Good solid phone with great battery life
by jocularjosh on July 1, 2009
Pros: - Great Battery life, even when playing music, 6 hours per battery bar
- Solid build
- Solid Intuitive interface
- Full QWERTY keyboard
- 8GB microSD and MP3 player
- IM support
- Loud clear speaker phone
- clear calls
- VZ NavigatorCons: - Keyboard solid, but not great. They keys are a bit stiff
- Color options are not great
- LCD, it is decent but could be a bit better resolution and support more colors
- No equalizer for those listening to music(which is me)
- a bit clunky overallSummary: I am your simple user using mainly texting, IM, music player and that is about all. If you want a good solid texting/IM phone with a super long battery ...
Summary: I am your simple user using mainly texting, IM, music player and that is about all. If you want a good solid texting/IM phone with a super long battery life even with music playing then this is your phone. For those of you who want a sleek beautiful phone with all the features then this is not for you, I'd go with the LG enV touch.
1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful.
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I would not reccomend this phone!
by nicky1221 on August 11, 2009
Pros: The keyboard is spacious and easy to use. Great call quality.
Cons: I don't like the front touch screen, the overall design is cramped, and it does not come with many good features.
Summary: I would only reccomend this to an eleven year-old whose getting their first phone or upgrading from a regular flip phone. It's not a great phone and there's ...
Summary: I would only reccomend this to an eleven year-old whose getting their first phone or upgrading from a regular flip phone. It's not a great phone and there's too many flaws.
1 out of 2 users found this user opinion helpful.
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Great, durable phone!
by smcclintock on October 27, 2009
Pros: BATTERY Life
ease of navigation through menus
easy to personalize
qwerty keyboard
the auto locking screen/phone function
voice commands system is greatCons: no flash for camera
can not rotate photos
wish screen was full inclusive touch screenSummary: I was reluctant to purchase this phone, but did out of financial concerns. Now everyone in my family wants it!. it was very easy to figure out. battery life is ...
Summary: I was reluctant to purchase this phone, but did out of financial concerns. Now everyone in my family wants it!. it was very easy to figure out. battery life is absolutely amazing, 2-3 days WITHOUT charging, that is with texting, camera, music player, and phone calls.
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Small and portable, easy to text.
by KF242 on October 20, 2009
Pros: Small and easy to carry with you. Very easy to text and the slide out keyboard makes the phone less bulky. Sound is very clear.
Cons: Slower than other phones I've had- when you select something on the menu it doesn't come up instantaneously. Doesn't have a flash on the camera.
Summary: All in all I like this phone. The sound quality is great and it's very easy to text. However, it is slightly slower than the LG phone I previously ...
Summary: All in all I like this phone. The sound quality is great and it's very easy to text. However, it is slightly slower than the LG phone I previously had. The size of the motorola rival is great and is easy to take with you anywhere.
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not worth the money
by dillell on October 14, 2009
Pros: slide keyboard for texting
Cons: drop calls. the slide broke after just a 60 days, in ohter words I had a two piece phone. Verizon will not replace the phone. Said I was to hard on the phone>
Summary: I would not recomend this phone. Poor quality in my opion. Very cheaply made. Will not hold up. Even my daughters friends had trouble with there rival as well.
Summary: I would not recomend this phone. Poor quality in my opion. Very cheaply made. Will not hold up. Even my daughters friends had trouble with there rival as well.
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Outstanding phone that can do anything you need
by ChicoStikk on October 12, 2009
Pros: Sturdy
Long Battery Life
Tons of features
-IM, mp3 player w/standar jack, picture mail, visual voice mail, Bluetooth, camcorder, etc.
Crystal Clear reception
TouchscreenCons: i guess it wouldn't do everything if you have a Juris Doctorate or run a Fortune 500 company.
Summary: The editors' negative comments on this phone are really subjective. There's no reason why this isn't a spectacular phone--true, it lacks the bells and whistles of an HTC ...
Summary: The editors' negative comments on this phone are really subjective. There's no reason why this isn't a spectacular phone--true, it lacks the bells and whistles of an HTC or Blackberry, but really, who needs that stuff? If you need a phone with great reception and wonderful call quality, text messaging, music player, expandable memory, video player, camera, camcorder, touch screen...then this will absolutely fulfill your expectations. I also don't understand this "lackluster" display they talk about; it's brighter and more vivid than an LG Dare. Great phone. Give it a try.
Specifications
- Manufacturer: Motorola
- Part number: 9370888
- Bottom Line: Though we like the Motorola Rival's features, its poor design keeps us from recommending it.
General
- Product Type Cellular phone With digital camera / digital player
- Service Provider Verizon Wireless
- Width 2 in
- Depth 0.7 in
- Height 3.8 in
- Weight 4.4 oz
- Body Color Tin silver
Cellular
- Technology CDMA2000 1X
- Band CDMA2000 1X 1900/800
- Phone Design Slider
- Antenna Internal
- Vibrating Alert Yes
- Polyphonic Ringer Yes
- Voice Dialing Yes
- Call Timer Yes
- Conference Call Capability Yes
- Voice Recorder Yes
- Caller ID Yes
- Speakerphone Yes
- Wireless Interface Bluetooth
- Additional Features QWERTY keyboard layout
Phone Memory
- Phone Book Capacity 1000 names & numbers
Messaging & Data Services
- Short Messaging Service (SMS) Yes
- Messaging Services Yahoo! Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger Service (AIM), Windows Live Messenger (MSN Messenger)
- Mobile Email Yes
- Internet Browser Yes
- Included Services VCAST, VZ Navigator
- EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized) Yes
- Messaging / Data Features Text messages, Instant message, Multimedia messages (MMS), Picture messages, Voice mail, E-Mail
Ring Tones
- Ring Tone Formats MP3, WAV, MIDI
Multimedia Features
- Downloadable Content Games, Ring tones, Wallpapers, Audio files, Video files
Digital Camera
- Camera highlights With a resolution of 2 megapixels, this camera phone will give you better pictures than other phones.
- Sensor Resolution 2 megapixels
Organizer
- Alarm Clock Yes
- Calendar Yes
- Reminder Yes
- Calculator Basic
Display
- Type LCD display
- Technology TFT
- Diagonal Size 2.2 in
- Color Support Color
- Features Backlit, Wallpaper, Screensaver
Connections
- Connector Type Headset jack - Mini-phone 3.5 mm, Micro-USB
Miscellaneous
- Included Accessories Battery, Wall charger
Power
- Type Power adapter
Battery
- Talk Time Up to 320 min
Product series
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Motorola Rival (silver, Verizon Wireless)
Manufacturer: Motorola
Specs: CDMA2000 1X 1900/800, Up to 320 min, With digital camera / digital player, 4.4 oz
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Motorola Rival (purple, Verizon Wireless)
Manufacturer: Motorola
Specs: CDMA2000 1X 1900/800, Up to 320 min, With digital camera / digital player, 4.4 oz
Accessories
Manufacturer info
- Motorola
- Manufacturer profile
- Browse Motorola products on Shopper.com
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- Website: http://commerce.motorola.com/consumer
- Address:
600 N. Highway 45, Suite AS342, Libertyville, IL 60048 - Phone: 847/576-5000
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