We check out the best new multimedia phone for Sprint Nextel and Boost Mobile. Does Moto's new clamshell offer walkie-talkie customers a media edge? Find out in our Motorola i9 review.
Review summary of the Motorola i9:
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 The Motorola i9 is the most powerful multimedia phone available on the iDEN network, which is kind of like bragging about a new sports car that uses leaded gasoline. The iDEN network is great for walkie-talkie calls, and the Moto i9 gets all the Nextel Direct Connect features business users and Boost Mobile fans crave. But buyers looking for an impressive multimedia device should look elsewhere, as the Motorola i9 comes up short in all of its advanced functions. The music player was basic and difficult to manage. The camera was lousy, and the external controls hardly helped us. Even the phone's design seemed out of touch: an amalgam of the dated RAZR styling with a touch of the Moto ROKR E8's controls. Not a winning combination, if you ask us. We wish Sprint had ditched the iDEN network altogether and stuck with the newer PTT services on their faster EV-DO Rev. A network, the technology used in the more appealing Sanyo Pro 700 phone, as this seems a better fit for the multimedia ambitions of the Motorola i9. If you need a multimedia phone for the Nextel Direct Connect network, the Motorola i9 is your best option by default. But if this is the best Sprint can offer, perhaps iDEN just isn't meant for music and pics. Release: March 2009. Price: $200.
Pros: More multimedia features than other iDEN phones. Large external screen with modeshift controls.
Cons: Flat keypad was hard to use; design seemed dated. Most multimedia features, especially camera and music, don't live up to expectations.
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Full Motorola i9 Review:
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Design – Good
No matter what you call the Motorola i9, there's no getting around the phone's RAZR heritage. It seems Motorola can hardly build a clamshell phone these days that doesn't look like a RAZR, and unfortunately, in the case of this multimedia walkie-talkie phone, the slim, sharp clamshell design just doesn't work. Granted, the Motorola i9 is a nice step forward for iDEN phones, as the walkie-talkie lineup is always bigger and bulkier. But when you take a step forward into the year 2004, that isn't much of a step. We had a lot of trouble with the keypad on the i9. The keys are seriously flat, which seems a poor choice on a walkie-talkie phone, even one that's going for style. The navigation pad in the center was difficult to manage, and we often found ourselves pressing too far out of the circle to make the correct choice. Also, the default buttons seem a bit confused. As on other iDEN phones, the center button doesn't open the main menu, it opens up a settings menu. Except on some applications, where it does act as a selector. There's a separate menu key off to the side. This layout seems counterintuitive, except perhaps to true iDEN devotees.
The Motorola i9 gets two large QVGA screens, one 2.2-inch screen inside and one 2-inch screen on the external flip. Both of these looked great. We found Nextel's menus to be a bit goofy looking and sluggish, but the screens did a nice job displaying text and pictures that were colorful and sharp. The external display is ringed by a series of touchable buttons. These fade in and out as you switch modes, so when you're in the camera mode, all you see are the camera controls for zoom, camcorder mode, etc. In music mode, you get music controls instead. In practice, this seemed like a gimmick, and it didn't offer us enough real control to keep us from opening the flip. But we still liked being able to activate the camera, browse pictures or play music without opening the phone.
Calling - Good
Calls on the Motorola i9 sounded better than on many other iDEN phone's we've tried, even iDEN smartphones we've used recently, like the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8350i. We normally expect a bit of static on iDEN calls, but the Motorola i9 kept noise to a minimum. The speakerphone, the key to any good walkie-talkie phone, was also nice and loud. It wasn't as abusively loud as we like on these phones, but it did a fine job in a noisy car.
For battery life, we got close to the 5 hour mark in a single call, which is even better than the 4.5 hours Motorola promises. Using the speakerphone drained the battery a bit quicker, so constant walkie-talkie users should expect less talk time. Reception was a serious problem. Sprint Nextel's iDEN network has been around for a while, but it doesn't reach every corner of the country, or even some of the corners around major cities. We had trouble making calls in our suburban New Jersey home, and the phone often lost service. In New York City and on the major interstates heading into town, we had no trouble.
Making a 3-way call over the normal cellular lines was easy enough, though it required some menu digging to figure out. Better to stick with group calling using the walkie-talkie service. The Motorola i9 gets the full compliment of Nextel Direct Connect walkie-talkie features, and the walkie-talkie calls we tried connected instantly, as they should.
Messaging - Good
For messaging, the Motorola i9 has some key features that we think business users will appreciate, but real chat-heads should look elsewhere. The text messaging app uses a simple but clean black and yellow interface, and we had no trouble fitting plenty of text on screen at once. For mobile e-mail, the i9 gets Sprint's fine Mobile E-mail app, which is quite capable. Not only did the mobile e-mail synchronize with our Gmail and even our Exchange e-mail accounts (the latter through Outlook Web Access), we were also able to look up contacts from our online address books and move them to the phone. Having such capable e-mail on a multimedia phone like the Moto i9 is a nice bonus that will make this phone more useful to corporate users. The phone lacks any other messaging features, like Instant Messaging or social networking apps, which means messaging will be more for business than pleasure.
Typing on the Motorola i9's keyboard was definitely not a pleasure. The phone aims for style over substance, with a flat one-piece keyboard more reminiscent of the Motorola ROKR E8. We didn't like the keys on that music phone, and we certainly don't like them on this phone, which should be striking more of a balance between multimedia and rugged usefulness. We hoped for a keyboard we could use with light gloves on, but it was difficult to type even with our bare fingers.
Music - Mediocre
The Motorola i9 seems to flaunt its musical prowess. After all, you can browser your music from the external screen and start playback without even opening the flip. Unfortunately, we had trouble getting our music to play properly on the Moto i9. The phone recognized our 8GB microSD card just fine, though it bugged us that we had to slide off the tight battery cover every time we wanted to swap it out. No matter where on the card we loaded our tunes, the phone wouldn't find them. In the end, we used our own microUSB cable and synchronized with Windows Media Player directly, so Mac fans might have trouble. Our album artwork didn't come through, but our music played just fine.
The external controls let you browse songs, control playback and view album artwork, and there is even a graphical EQ that bounces with your music. Still, since Motorola went through the trouble of adding specialized external controls just for music playback, we wish they had included a standard, 3.5mm headphone jack. Stereo Bluetooth paired nicely with our wireless speakers, but we like using our favorite headphones when we're listening on the go, and that wasn't possible on this phone.
Camera - Mediocre
With its 3.1-megapixel, auto focus camera, we expected much more from the Motorola i9 in terms of image quality. Unfortunately, the pictures we took looked like standard cameraphone fare, and nothing special. Details were fuzzy, pictures looked over-sharpened and digitized, and images were overall disappointing.
The camera app on the phone also seemed a bit buggy. First of all, the camera had a hard time remembering our defaults, and so we spent a whole day shooting just to find our images were in a smaller, VGA resolution, instead of the mighty 3.1-megapixels. Many images weren't saved properly, so we lost about half of our set to bad image files. We like the idea of having an external viewfinder, especially with the mode shift controls around the external screen, but in practice, this didn't work so well. First of all, the best thing about an external viewfinder is the ability to shoot self portraits, but the Motorola i9's camera lens is on the wrong side of the phone for that use. Second, the external controls are limited to flash and digital zoom. How about white balance control, or resolution? Better yet, we'd like to see a full settings menu on the external screen.
GPS and Web browsing - Mediocre
The phone has a GPS sensor built in, but it doesn't ship with any software for turn-by-turn directions. It can only report your coordinates. Presumably, there will be navigation software available for the Motorola i9, but at launch, there were no apps to download from Sprint's online store. Boost Mobile users will be especially left out, as the phone doesn't come with the interesting Loopt location-based social networking app. As the pre-paid carriers premiere handset, it's a shame that the Moto i9 didn't come with all of the best software available on Sprint's youthful iDEN brand.
With its slower iDEN network, the Motorola i9 was also a disappointing phone for Web browsing. Basic mobile sites, like Sprint's WAP homepage or the mobile CNN.com page, loaded fine, though they took their sweet time. For more advanced sites and full-html browsing, users will have to look elsewhere.
Price and availability
The Motorola i9 is available now on Boost Mobile for $300, or on Sprint Nextel for $200 with a contract agreement.
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