We beat up another rugged walkie-talkie phone from AT&T in our Motorola Tundra review. Is this the multimedia phone to take on your next expedition?
Review summary of the Motorola Tundra:
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 The Motorola Tundra is a fine rugged phone, but it won't be our mil-spec phone of choice until the price comes down just a bit. It is a better phone than the Samsung Rugby in some key areas, but only barely. Motorola's Crystal Talk technology really seems to work, and the Tundra has better call quality than any other rugged phone we've seen. But that's the only worthwhile advantage this phone has, and for some customers, the Rugby is good enough to save a few bucks. We liked the interface on the Tundra, and the phone’s bubbly keys and rubber grip made it easy to use, even with gloves on. If you're hoping for an all around multimedia powerhouse tucked into a thick shell, you'll probably be disappointed with the multimedia and Web features on this phone. But buyers looking for a rugged walkie-talkie phone with the best call quality around will be pleased with what they find. Release: January 2009. Price: $180.
Pros: Durable and rugged. Nice buttons. Great call quality with robust calling features.
Cons: Every other feature beyond calling and durability suffers. Poor messaging options, dated Web browser, lousy camera.
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Full Motorola Tundra Review:
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Design - Good
Rugged phones are all starting to look alike. Take for example AT&T's two prominent, rugged, push-to-talk (PTT) phones, the Samsung Rugby and the subject of our review, the Motorola Tundra. Both are thick, rubberized and rugged, with solid port covers that block out moisture and bubbly keys that would be fairly easy to press with work gloves on. Of the two, we prefer the Motorola Tundra just slightly, thanks to its grippy, bumpy texture and more-rounded look, but its a call that's too close to be meaningful. Ultimately, the Tundra's thick shell delivers what you'd expect from a phone rated to Mil-Spec M810F; it's built like a truck. We'd rather it were built like a battleship, as these rugged phones always feel a bit disappointing when they aren't completely waterproof, like the Casio G'zOne Boulder on sale from Verizon Wireless. We beat up the Motorola Tundra pretty bad, and it took quite a licking. We took advantage of the cold Northeastern weather and left it overnight in a snowbank. We threw it down a flight of concrete stairs, dropped it over and over again, and it kept working, with hardly a scratch on it.
Under the hood, the Motorola Tundra has a very basic, but nice looking user interface. It's a standard Motorola design we've seen before, but Moto does a nice job delivering a clean, smooth-looking interface. There are still some annoying redundancies, though. The AT&T GPS menu option leads to a submenu with only one option, AT&T Navigator, when the latter should really launch from the menu directly. The phone can also be sluggish scrolling through the menus.
For buttons, the Motorola Tundra has plenty of extras, but we think Moto could do a better job assigning smart keys. For instance, there are dedicated keys beneath the screen for the Cellular Video service and the MediaNET Web browser. Honestly, are those the best choices for this phone's intended audience? The Samsung Rugby has a dedicated key for the AT&T Navigator app, and we think that would be a much better choice. The PTT key is the largest of the bunch, as it should be, and there's also a dedicated button on top to activate the speakerphone during a call.
Calling - Very good
The Motorola Tundra is a robust phone with some nice, advanced talking options. The key selling feature might be AT&T's walkie-talkie-like PTT features. AT&T has a surprising number of PTT phones, so if you know somebody with an accompanying device or plan, instant communication is yours for the taking. Otherwise, for basic calling the phone is still an able device. The Motorola Tundra uses Moto's Crystal Talk II tech, a noise reduction feature that enhances calls, especially in a noisy environment. We were able to talk at a near-whisper in our car on the highway with the windows rolled down, and our callers had little trouble understanding us. The phone also got great reception, usually a full 5 bars of 3G whenever we happened to check the status. Unfortunately, battery life lags behind a bit on this phone, and we managed just over 4 hours of talking time. This was mixed use with the speakerphone enabled, but its still a bit low for our tastes. We'd like to see Moto squeeze another hour into the Tundra.
Like all good PTT phones, the Motorola Tundra has an abusively loud speakerphone. We had a good time making calls with the extra-loud speaker, and an even better time playing our music. With the phone open to expose the speaker grill, the Tundra's sound easily fills a room.
The Motorola Tundra's address book is among its best-looking features, and Moto's designers did a nice job creating a clean-looking contact list. There are plenty of fields, including slots for "Spouse" and "Children," which is a nice touch. The phone uses speaker-independent voice recognition, but the software on the Tundra isn't as good as Nuance's top-notch voice dialing app. It took us time to learn the timing and vocabulary required to use the software.
Messaging - Good
Messaging is a disappointment on the Motorola Tundra, which is too bad, because the working-class audience for this device might have appreciated another way to stay in touch. Simple text messaging is fine, but more advanced options, like IM and e-mail, come up short. For instant messaging, the phone uses a very basic client to access AOL, MSN and Yahoo. For e-mail, the Motorola Tundra gets AT&T's underpowered Mobile E-mail app. The AT&T e-mail app comes with several presets for e-mail services, but our favorite for personal mail, Gmail, wasn't included. Neither was Exchange support, which is finding its way onto more and more so-called dumbphones. The bulbous keypad was fine for typing, but nothing special. It's raised texture was helpful when we tried typing in winter gloves, but it wasn't game changing.
Multimedia - Mediocre
For a rugged phone like the Motorola Tundra, multimedia features are an obvious extra. For some reason, Moto decided to slap a Cellular Video button right above the keypad, but otherwise the media features are mostly hidden. There is no "play" button among the external controls, though, strangely, there is a "stop" button up top, next to the speakerphone button. The music player is buried under the "My Stuff" menu option, and its fairly basic, though it does have some interesting sound adjustment features. We loaded plenty of MP3 onto a microSD card and the device found them right away. Our album artwork didn't come through, but songs played back without incident. The player has a stereo widening effect, a bass booster and a preset EQ, and these were helpful when we paired the Tundra with our Bluetooth headphones, but they didn't make much difference when we were just using the speaker.
The Cellular Video service from AT&T is really a selection of short, streaming clips, and we've long since given up on these gimmicky, expensive video options. Videos loaded quickly, and playback was smooth, but the video itself was small. Even at the reduced size, it still looked blocky and pixilated. The Tundra has no apparent option to rotated the video for full screen viewing, and there are few playback options available in the video player.
Web browsing - Mediocre
With its 3G networking, the Motorola Tundra might make a good Web browser in a pinch, but the Motorola Symphony browser packed onboard was a messy disappointment. On the AT&T Website, the carrier is claiming that the Tundra comes with the Opera browser, which would have been a great improvement if this were true. Unfortunately, the Symphony browser had a tough time chewing through our own home page. It managed to load the entire site, but the layout was all over the place, with text boxes that ran into each other and strange elements that appeared out of nowhere. Speed wasn't so much the issue, as the browser loaded pages quickly. Even navigating through pages was fast thanks to speedy scrolling. Still, the way pages looked, they were hardly worth browsing for long.
Camera – Mediocre
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the camera on the Motorola Tundra is lousy and hardly worth using, except in dire emergencies. Cameraphones have enough trouble maintaining picture quality, so we suspect that the extra durability required for these rugged phones also results in a lower quality camera, as none of the rugged phones we've tested have produced acceptable images. The Tundra had trouble with sharpness, color, lighting . . . you name it. We appreciate being able to use the tiny external screen as a viewfinder for self portraits, but even on that postage stamp of a display, we could tell that these were not going to be good shots.
Tiny figures
The picture is blurry, the figurine's color is off, and even the white balance doesn't come close to reality.
Self Portrait
This is among the worst, and strangest, self portraits we've ever taken. Brown hair has been rendered strangely grey, and though we were admittedly poorly lit, nothing can excuse the blown out side of our face in this picture.
eBay shot
Detail is lacking and there is a strange, white haze in the center of this drawing of Snake Eyes' head. We're not moving any action figures with pictures like these.
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