A descendant of the Ming, a Moto phone that was wildly popular in Asia, the Krave is a rounded 4.6-ounce slab (4.1 by 2 by 0.8 inches, HWD) with what appears to be a clear, protective flip cover over the screen. But that "clear" cover is actually composed of a nearly invisible wire mesh that allows the cover to become a touch screen, too.
This is a neat concept, but it's slightly self-defeating. You can control the music, TV, or GPS applications through the cover, which means you can watch TV, for example, with the flip closed. But if you don't hit the physical lock switch, it's easy to trigger apps accidentally while the phone is in your pocket.
When you flip up the clear cover, the earpiece—a silver Motorola logo—looks as if it's floating in space—an extremely cool effect. With the flip closed, you get a bright color screen of 240 by 320 pixels; opening the flip reveals the full 2.4-inch screen and adds another 80 pixels, bringing the total screen resolution to 240 by 400. Above the display, there are just two buttons: Home and Power. The sides of the handset house the microSD card slot, 3.5mm headphone jack, volume controls, micro USB power/connection port, lock switch, and voice-dialing and camera buttons.
The main reason to buy the Krave is V Cast Mobile TV, powered by Qualcomm's FLO TV. which is ten channels of honest-to-goodness TV from partners like Comedy Central, ESPN, and Nickelodeon. The programs, however, are time-shifted; they're not showing what's on your TV at that moment. Boob tube addicts will also appreciate Verizon's new library of streaming episodes from partners like MTV and the Sci-Fi channel, which streamed smoothly, though not in full screen.
In a fringe reception area, TV on the Krave worked well laid down on a table, but not when I held it in my hand because my hand partially blocked the antenna. With better reception, TV worked well in both scenarios, but again, holding the phone up reduced the quality. TV audio through the phone's speaker and either wired or Bluetooth headphones sounded just fine.
This is the best FLO TV experience so far, because of the big screen and clear sound. The Krave seems less like a TV phone than like a little TV.
As a voice phone, the Krave is solid, once you can get over the fact that it feels odd pressed up against your face. The drop hinge causes the top half of the phone to fall about half an inch behind the bottom half, which is an unusual form factor. The Krave has strong RF reception, good voice quality in the earpiece, and adequate in-ear feedback of your own voice. The speakerphone is loud but transmits a lot of background noise, too. The Krave worked well with our stereo Motorola S9 Bluetooth headset and our mono Aliph Jawbone headset. Ringtones are loud, but the vibrate function isn't very powerful, though it does make a noticeable buzzing sound. Battery life, at 6 hours 20 minutes of talk time, is simply awesome.
But otherwise, the Krave's too-standard Verizon software is pretty boring, especially held up against the competing LG Dare.
The phone features visual voice mail, but so do an increasing number of Verizon handsets. The dial pad, address book, and SMS application come across as generic. You enter data by tapping on a portrait-style T9 keypad or a landscape-format QWERTY, both with slight vibrating feedback. Both keypads feel lively and responsive. It works well. But the software, overall, is far too similar to too many other Verizon feature phones to stand out from the crowd.
You get Verizon's underpowered OpenWave barely HTML browser, and very basic AOL, MSN, and Yahoo! IM clients, along with the standard Verizon e-mail client, which can access AOL, Windows Live, Yahoo!, or any POP/IMAP account. The VZ Navigator GPS software also worked well, including rerouting me around a traffic jam.
For music, the Krave hooks up to PCs and syncs with Rhapsody clients using a standard microUSB cable. You can also buy new music over the air, but you can't download files from your Rhapsody library over the air. Our handset synced smoothly and easily, and loaded music onto our 16GB SanDisk microSD card without a problem.
I wasn't able to get a Bluetooth file transfer to work, and Motorola said the Krave isn't eligible for Verizon's Bluetooth modem plans. This isn't a huge deal, since the phone doesn't hit Verizon's fastest network, anyway; it runs on the older EV-DO Rev 0.
A surprising number of BREW games run on the Krave, considering that the phone doesn't have a physical keyboard. When I loaded Pac-Man, for instance, I could control my little guy by tapping the top, bottom, or either side of the screen. Tapping the corners of the screen activated virtual soft keys.
Built-in applications aren't bad. I was just hoping for something a little more fun, or new on this unusual phone—something like the Dare's photo contact cards or draggable menu items, for instance.
The camera is oddly bereft of options. You can't change the resolution of your photos, like you can on plenty of other phones on the market today: it's 2-megapixel or nothing. There are two video modes: MMS and 320-by-240 at 10 frames per second. Shots were a bit soft, with highly saturated colors. They weren't terrible, but they weren't great, either. At least the roomy 128MB of built-in memory leaves lots of space for photos.
At $149.99 (with contract), the Motorola Krave ZN4 goes for $50 less than its main competitor, the LG Dare. Also, the Krave's touch keypad is a bit more responsive than the Dare's. But the Dare prevails in plenty of other ways with a much better camera, a better browser, and most important, software with a sense of whimsy, fun, and freshness. The Krave costs the same as Verizon's other large-screen mobile TV phone, the LG Voyager, which adds a physical QWERTY keyboard to the mix. I definitely crave the Krave's hardware, but its generic software doesn't allow it to stand out from the crowd.
