We snap open Motorola's newest clamshell on Verizon Wireless, and it isn't a RAZR! Is this lightweight flip a phone worth checking out? Find the answer in our Motorola Rapture VU30 review.
Review summary of the Motorola Rapture VU30:
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 The Motorola Rapture VU30 is a feature packed, light weight flip phone for Verizon Wireless' 3G network. While most of the features work as they should, the phone fails to stand out in any way, except that it does a fairly good job all around. Music features were okay, with good external controls, but the music player and music store were basic and underpowered. Web browsing is a chore, and the camera took lousy pictures, but turn-by-turn navigation worked nicely, and was useful even with the flip closed. Instant messaging and e-mail will be a little disappointing to AOL, MSN and Yahoo fans, and completely unavailable to anyone else. So, everything is accounted for, but nothing is too great, except the price, which is much too great for this phone, with a $170 price tag at launch. For that price, smartphones and pseudo-smartphone abound, and we can't see choosing the Rapture over better phones on The Network (to see our comparison of recent Verizon Wireless flip phones, click here). Overall, it seems like Motorola's hardware does a nice job making things easy, but the phone falls short with lousy software that keeps the features from living up to their potential. Release: October 2008. Price: $130.
Pros: Plenty of shortcut buttons. Light weight. Very good call quality and features. External touchscreen with music controls.
Cons: Lousy messaging apps with few preset options. Basic, disappointing multimedia features. Camera images were poor.
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Full Motorola Rapture VU30 Review:
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Design - Good
The Motorola Rapture VU30 reminds us of the older Motorola PEBL design, with its rounded edges and smooth surfaces. We like the phone's look, but the plastic felt a bit cheap. It felt light in the hand and was easy to grip, thanks to the soft touch finish on the back of the phone. The front of the phone is glossy, with an external, color touchscreen hidden beneath the slick black plastic. The external touchscreen kept things simple, but useful. We could open the music player or the camera, and though the camera screen lacked useful options, the music player let us browse our playlists and skip through tracks without opening the clamshell. Sometimes, the touchscreen went off accidentally while we gripped the phone, but Motorola includes a lock key in case this becomes a problem.
In fact, Motorola includes plenty of useful shortcut keys. There is a camera button, a music button, a speakerphone button and a voice dialing button. The keypad isn't very pretty, but all those raised, circular dots made typing much easier than on a phone with a flat, slick keypad, like the Nokia 7205, also on Verizon Wireless. In fact, the two phones were quite similar in terms of features, but the Motorola Rapture VU30 had a more useful design, while the Nokia 7205 simply looked prettier.
The internal display on the Motorola Rapture was pleasant to use, bright and colorful. The 2.2-inch screen had a nice, QVGA resolution, and both pictures and text looked great. The external screen suffered from some screen door effect, but was still useful as a camera viewfinder. Motorola has touched up the Verizon Wireless menus just enough to make them nice looking, with modern, colorful icons, and we like that there were so many different menu layouts to choose from. We appreciate having easy access to VZ Navigator, an app we use all the time, though some common apps, like the music player or the Web browser, were still hidden under confusing layers.
Calling - Good
Calls on the Motorola Rapture VU30 sounded good, but could have been better. Voice quality sounded better to our callers than it did to us. The earpiece on the phone was a bit quiet, and the Rapture lacked the aural feedback we like, which lets us hear ourselves while we talk and adds depth to the overall sound. Battery life on the phone was also disappointing. Motorola promises 4.5 hours of talk time, but in multiple tests we had trouble breaking the 4 hour mark. Throw in some Web browsing and GPS navigation and the phone drained quickly. At least reception was good. We got a solid 4 bars of EV-DO service, better than other Verizon Wireless phones we had on hand, including that Nokia 7205.
The address book on the Motorola Rapture VU30 was nothing special, and we'd like more fields for addresses and other contact info. We'd also like the address book to link to other apps on the phone, so we could send an e-mail directly from a contact list entry. Conference calling was easy enough; a single button push joined a 3-way conversation, though we hardly knew it since the phone's calling screens were bare and didn't tell us which calls were connected.
For other calling features, we love the dedicated key for the speaker-independent voice recognition software. The voice dialing app worked great, and recognized names and numbers as we spoke them. The speakerphone button was nice, though we don't use speaker very much, so we wish we could have re-mapped the key to something more useful (VZ Navigator, for instance?). Still, the speaker was loud, but not abusively so, like we prefer.
Messaging - Good
The Motorola Rapture VU30 comes with some of the more basic messaging options we've seen on a phone this expensive. For both instant messaging and e-mail, we could only connect to AOL, MSN and Yahoo accounts. No Gtalk or other IM services, and no way to add our own custom e-mail settings. Verizon Wireless offers a Wireless Sync e-mail client, but this costs an additional $20 per month (!), and is not worth the additional price.
At least text messaging worked nicely. We found the keypad, with its strange rows of silver dots, to be a bit ugly, but it functioned well and was easy for typing. Keys were spaced far enough apart, and we had no trouble banging out SMS messages on the Moto Rapture. In the messaging app, we could fit about 2/3 of a message on screen at once, which was fine for us. The phone uses iTAP to auto-complete words while you type. We found this to be intrusive, as the phone rarely suggested the right word, and often made suggestions that made no grammatical sense, Often, the suggestions weren't even real words. Lazying? Not a real word.
Multimedia - Good
The multimedia experience on the Motorola Rapture VU30, especially the music player, might have been barebones, but it was still fairly useful. We like being able to start up the music player using the external controls, a trick the Nokia 7205 wasn't able to pull off. Once we loaded our tracks into the proper folder (picky, picky), the player had no trouble playing our tunes, though our album artwork didn't come through. Some simple changes would have made all the difference here. A simple 3.5mm headphone jack, for instance, would have been a nice touch, but the phone uses a sub-standard 2.5mm connector.
Verizon Wireless' V Cast service also offers a selection of streaming TV shows and downloadable music videos, in addition to the deep catalogue in the V Cast Music Store. Like the music store tracks, these videos could get expensive, but we were pleased to find a couple gems, including the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, though this was split into nearly a couple dozen streaming parts. Videos looked blocky and lacked fine details. Often, the sound and the lips on screen would fall out of sync, but this is par for the course on Verizon's V Cast service. Still, videos loaded quickly so we didn't have to wait long to start watching.
Camera - Mediocre
Images from the Motorola Rapture VU30's 2-megapixel camera were pretty lousy. Color was all over the place. In some of the vegetable pics below, the colors pop off the page with oversaturated hues. In others, the same colors seem muted and lifeless. The external screen on the Motorola Rapture can act as a viewfinder, so you can use the camera without opening the lid. But we prefer when the screen and the lens are on the same side of the phone, so that we can use the external screen to help with self portraits. This wasn't the case on the Rapture, and in fact the external viewfinder helped little. Colors looked dim on the outer screen, which isn't nearly as bright or vivid as the internal one. Plus, the touchscreen has few controls for the camera: digital zoom and portrait / landscape switching are all you get.
Web browser - Mediocre
The Web browser on the Motorola Rapture VU30 is a very basic WAP browser. It couldn't handle any full html page we tried loading, and even mobile pages looked lousy rendered with this app. The real star of the show for Web browsing on the Rapture is Verizon Wireless' new Dashboard app, which is basically a set of mobile Web shortcuts organized into a tidy menu. There seemed to be a nice collection of channels, including a Music channel, an ESPN channel, Games, etc. The problem is that the channels themselves are half-baked attempts, at best. For instance, we clicked on a "Phish" link in the Music channel to check on the band's upcoming tour, and were carted off to a ringtone store. Worst of all, the store wasn't even offering Phish ringtones?! What's the point of the link if it doesn't lead anywhere?
GPS Navigation - Good
GPS navigation on the Motorola Rapture VU30 worked nicely. The phone found us with no trouble and tracked us on our commute from New York City to suburban New Jersey. The newer Nokia 7205 spoiled us a bit, as its version of VZ Navigator can also accept voice input. But otherwise, VZ Navigator worked as we expected, warts and all. The navigation app uses too many different screen for a single route. There is one screen for zooming, another for tracking your route, and another for actual turn-by-turn directions. The app needs a polished, consolidated interface. We liked that the external screen displayed the upcoming street names and turn directions. We wish it could show a map, or perhaps offer some control over the app with the phone closed, but we'll settle for the loud spoken directions and the useful turn-by-turn view.
Price and availability
The Motorola Rapture VU30 will start selling for $130 ((Verizon Wireless)) in October 2008.
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