Motorola Triumph lags? Photon 4G and Droid Bionic with Moto skin better? June 13, 2011Gadgets & Mobile News2 Comment

Virgin Mobile’s “pure” Android experience is “a bit sluggish,” Photon 4G and Droid Bionic’s Moto UI plus dual-core power better?

Honestly speaking, the new Motorola user interface tweak for Android looks promising after watching a couple of videos in YouTube showcasing the upcoming 4G phone of Sprint Wireless — the first dual-core Motorola smartphone of the carrier, the Motorola Photon 4G.

Packed with the latest NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor that also powers the Motorola Xoom, T-Mobile G2x and other new Android smartphones and tablets, the new Motorola Photon 4G is obviously one of the high-end smartphones to wait in the coming months.

According to Sprint’s official press release, the Motorola Photon 4G can shoot high-definition videos courtesy of 8 megapixel rear shooter, and can initiate and receive video calls with a front-facing VGA camera. Specs wise, the Photon 4G is obviously the Motorola Atrix 4G of Sprint Wireless, Atrix 4G is an exclusive Motorolasmartphone distributed by AT&T in USA.

The new Photon 4G is also a cousin of Verizon’s upcoming Droid Bionic with LTE connectivity that might hit the market in the next coming months too. The Droid Bionic, Atrix 4G and the Photon 4G are capable of using Motorola’s high-end accessories or the so-called webtop add-ons including the popular LapDock that transforms your phone into a functioning laptop with Firefox browser.

Unlike the Atrix 4G though, the Photon 4G will include a brand-new, redesigned from ground up (I think they started from scratch again), and very promising Motorola user interface that will surely challenge the popularity of HTC’s Sense and Samsung’s iPhone-ish like TouchWiz that also received a revamp (now featured by the Galaxy S2). Verizon’s Droid Bionic is also expected to include the same new Moto UI, if I’m not mistaken.

The new Motorola skin featured by Photon 4G also includes better design, and usability with the social networking widgets that look like the Metro UI of Windows phone. I think the Droid Bionic of Verizon and the Evo 3D (of Sprint) are getting a new strong rival. Ka ching.

But Virgin Mobile’s cheaper Motorola phone is also getting some attention, especially if the consumer is an Android purist. According to Motorola, the new phone called “Triumph” of the prepaid carrier is packed with slightly modified vanilla Android FroYo (2.2) operating system. Basically, a stock Google Android smartphone is theoretically faster because of the absence of some heavy carrier bloatware, plus the RAM eating custom UIs that some manufacturers include.

Surprisingly, PC Magazine is claiming that the “almost untouched” Android Frozen Yogurt plus 1 GHz processor-powered Motorola Triumph and its 480×800 4.1 inches (diagonal) touchscreen “felt a bit sluggish.” The RAM of the Triumph is 512 MB, which is quickly becoming the “standard RAM” of high-end Android smartphones.

I’m currently using an unlocked, and rooted T-Mobile G2x, which is also an almost pure Google Android FroYo smartphone (and includes some useless T-Mobile add ons like WiFi calling and GPS app), and I’m happy because it’s snappy and a very fast smartphone.

Is it possible that PC Mag’s Motorola Triumph is a “turtle phone” because it’s just a test phone? And still not the final version that is expected to hit the market?

I hope so, because I love pure Google Android.

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