Digital Trends

Motorola Krave ZN4

October 14th, 2008 | by Stewart Wolpin

Features and Design

The Motorola Krave is a fully-equipped multimedia device, with a superlative MP3/AAC music player with connections to both Verizon's V CAST Music store and the Rhapsody music subscription service. You can access the player by tapping the Music icon right through the touch cover. The Krave also includes V CAST TV, the MediaFLO broadcast TV service. Krave's microSD slot can further accommodate a card of up to 8 GB in maximum size, which will hold around 2000 tracks, and there's a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack. 

What’s more, included are all the bells and whistles you now expect from this kind of multimedia touchscreen device, including an accelerometer which automatically re-orients Web pages, video and photos when you rotate the phone from portrait to landscape (vertical to horizontal) views.

The Krave is additionally an EV-DO Rev. A phone equipped with a WAP 2.0 Web browser and a complete menu of POP3 and IMAP email, messaging, instant messaging and even chat capabilities. Unlike the iPhone and the new G1 Android phone from T-Mobile, you have to pay extra for VZ Nav, Verizon's navigation program, to take advantage of Krave's A-GPS capabilities.

Accessories

You get only the phone charger. No other accessories are included. At press time, the phone had not been listed on the Verizon website so we couldn't check available accessories. 

Form Factor

Krave's touch cover completely covers the front surface of the phone and easily flips up, as with any other flip phone. Since you'll be touching both the touch cover and the main LCD screen, this means you'll now have two screens to keep clean. 

Even with its innovative touch cover though, Krave looks and acts like a standard flip cell phone. Its long 2.8-inch 240 x 400 pixel screen – most cell screens measure 240 x 320 pixels – dominates its front face. These extra 80 pixels are especially helpful when reading Web pages or scrolling through long contact or song lists. Above the bright and crystalline screen are a white backlit Home key and a red backlit Power key. Both are covered when the touch cover is down.

At the edge of the touch cover is Krave's earpiece. When flipped up for use during a call, the touch cover seems a little rickety, as if it might snap off if you press it too hard against your ear. It won’t, but you will want to keep a finger or two up to brace it.

Unfortunately, the touch cover obstructs your use of the touch QWERTY keyboard, which can only be used when the cover is open. There's no way to hold the phone and reach around the cover with your left thumb to tap keys. You'll have no choice but to tap with only your right fingers.

The slide touch cover lock switch on the right side of the Krave disables touch capability. Since the screen is quite sensitive, you'll want to engage the lock before you slip the phone into a pocket or bag. The problem is, you're likely to forget the lock is engaged and start tapping the cover only to find that nothing will happen. More than once, you’ll find it takes a couple of maddening minutes to realize you have to first disengage the touch lock.

The Krave has a microUSB power jack, a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack and a microUSB power jack. All are covered with a rubber gasket, which is fine for the card slot, but annoying for the headphone and USB jacks.

Multimedia

With its touch controls, the Krave easily adapts between music and video playback, with a full suite of touch commands offered on-screen. 

You'll have to drag-and-drop AAC and MP3 tracks onto an 8GB microSD card because there's no USB cable included – Windows' drag-and-drop Explore function is much faster and easier than using Bluetooth. You also don't get any free earphones.

Your tunes are delineated just like they would be on an iPod – lists arranged by artist, track name, album, playlists, etc. The Krave is a little slower to load all the music from the card than a standalone MP3 player, however, and you'll wait another few seconds after you hit "Play All" or "Shuffle."

All the track data is housed on one screen as the song plays, along with album art and transport controls. Tap album art and you get a scrollable queue of tracks. With the screen open, you also get loop, queue, play option and shuffle touch controls that disappear when you close the clear cover.

On the downside, music won't play in the background while you're using other applications. As soon as you exit the music player, the music ends. But the music, which ends when answering a call or responding to message alerts, will restart afterwards.

Even though the touch cover is completely clear, you'll want to watch videos with the cover flipped up – while transparent, it's still another piece of glass between you and the image.

Krave's biggest drawback as a portable media player (PMP) is its 2.8-inch screen – that measurement is misleading. The video viewing area is only 240 x 320 pixels (the equivalent of around 2.4 inches) more than an inch smaller than that found on the iPhone. Most phones in this class have at least a 3-inch screen. As a result, Krave's video viewing experience isn't as satisfying as it is on other touchscreen models with larger viewing areas.

Image Courtesy of Motorola