Today we shall be reviewing the Motorola Admiral XT603. This is a very interesting phone. It looks great and it is also strong enough for the time it came out. Heck it may even measure up to some devices released nowadays ( although I somewhat doubt it since today you can mostly see devices with more than one core ). The Motorola Admiral XT603 was released for Sprint. This is not a regular GSM device since it works with CDMA networks and not the usual kinds.
Well without further ado let us begin this little review.
GENERAL
We shall begin by analyzing some of the more general aspects of the Motorola Admiral XT603 such as : supported networks and release date. The Motorola Admiral XT603 supports both 2G and 3G networks. As I said before they’re CDMA networks, not the usual kind with which you are used to. The supported networks are as following : CDMA 800 / 1900 as the 2G ones and CDMA 2000 1xEV-DO as the 3G one. The Motorola Admiral XT603 was announced in October 2011 and released shortly after in the same month.
BODY
This part of the review shall cover some of the key points regarding the aspect of the Motorola Admiral XT603, mainly : the size of the phone, the weight and any distinguishable features which may make the phone stand out from a crowd. The dimensions of the Motorola Admiral XT603 are as following : 119 x 62 x 12.2 mm. The Motorola Admiral XT603 weighs somewhere around 134 grams. This device has both a QWERTY keyboard on it and touch sensitive controls. Also, the Motorola Admiral XT603 is MIL-STD-810F certified salt, dust, humidity, rain, vibration, solar radiation, transport and thermal shock resistant.
DISPLAY
In this part of the review we shall be covering the finer points of the display, things such as : the type of screen, the screen size, the pixel density of the device, the protection and any distinguishing marks of the Motorola Admiral XT603. The type of screen of the Motorola Admiral XT603 is a TFT capacitive touchscreen with around 16 million colors. The size of the screen is around 3.1 inches. The resolution of this device is around 480 x 640 pixels. The pixel density of the Motorola Admiral XT603 is around 258 ppi which is pretty awesome. The Motorola Admiral XT603 also has multitouch. The mode of protection of the Motorola Admiral XT603 is Corning Gorilla Glass which is a pretty good mode of screen protection.
SOUND
This part of the review shall cover the sound of the Motorola Admiral XT603, to be more exact : the alert types, loudspeaker and audio jack as well as whether or not the device has any means of sound enhancement on it whatsoever. I’m sorry to say but the Motorola Admiral XT603 doesn’t have any means of sound enhancement whatsoever. The alert types of the Motorola Admiral XT603 are as following : vibration, MP3 and WAV ringtones. The Motorola Admiral XT603 also has a loudspeaker and its audio jack is a 3.5 mm jack.
MEMORY
During this part of the review we shall be covering the memory of the Motorola Admiral XT603, more precisely : the internal storage space and ways of increasing it and the RAM memory. The storage space of the Motorola Admiral XT603 is around 4 GB, and if that isn’t well enough to suit your needs you are free to use the Micro SD card slot to expand your storage space with up to 32 GB. The RAM of the Motorola Admiral XT603 isn’t that great, but it’s enough to suffice : 512 MB. While I can honestly say it could have been better with 1 GB, in the end what’s the purpose of all that performance. If you’re planning on just using it for a phone than you really don’t require so much performance.
DATA CONNECTION
During this part of the review we shall be covering the data connection of the Motorola Admiral XT603, mainly : the GPRS and EDGE, the speed itself, the WLAN and the Bluetooth and USB connections. The Motorola Admiral XT603 doesn’t have GPRS or EDGE, but then again most phones which function with CDMA and LTE networks lack those two. The speed of the Motorola Admiral XT603 is Rev. A up to 3.1 MB/s, which is pretty common among CDMA and LTE devices. The WLAN of the Motorola Admiral XT603 is Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n with both DLNA and Wi-Fi hotspot. The Bluetooth of the device is v2.1 with A2DP and EDR.
CAMERA
In this part of the review we shall be analyzing the camera or cameras of the Motorola Admiral XT603, precisely : the main and secondary cameras, their features and their capabilities. The Motorola Admiral XT603 has a main camera of 5 MP power capable of photographing at a resolution of approximately 2592 x 1944 pixels. The features of the main camera are as following : autofocus, LED flash and geo-tagging. The Motorola Admiral XT603 is capable of recording video in 480p quality at a fluency of around 30 frames per second. The Motorola Admiral XT603 doesn’t have a secondary frontal camera, but then again few people actually use those anyway.
BATTERY LIFE
In this part of the review of the Motorola Admiral XT603 we shall be discussing the battery of the Motorola Admiral XT603 : the type of battery and how long it can function. Despite the fact that the Motorola Admiral XT603 has a Standard Li-Ion 1860 mAh battery, it can only function for around 9 hours of talk-time and who knows how many hours in stand-by.
HARDWARE
Now we shall be looking at the hardware of the Motorola Admiral XT603, more exactly the three great components of hardware : processor, motherboard and graphics card. The processor of the Motorola Admiral XT603 is a Single-Core 1.2 GHz Scorpion processor. The chipset or mother board is a Qualcomm MSM8655 Snapdragon and the graphics card is an Adreno 205 card. It’s a pretty decent set of hardware for the time this phone came out in. It’s quite weak if you are considering it by our standards.
SOFTWARE
This part of the review will be oriented towards analyzing the software of this device, mainly the current version and whether or not it can be upgraded. The Motorola Admiral XT603 comes equipped with Android OS v2.3.4 Gingerbread and it cannot be upgraded further to Ice Cream Sandwich. Still, a good OS nonetheless.
FEATURES
This part of the review will cover some of the more general features of the Motorola Admiral XT603 as well as the phone’s capabilities. The sensors of the Motorola Admiral XT603 are as following : Accelerometer, Proximity and Compass. The messaging on the Motorola Admiral XT603 can be done via : SMS ( with threaded view ), MMS, E-Mail, IM and Push Mail. The browser of the Motorola Admiral XT603 uses HTML and has integrated support for Adobe Flash. The Motorola Admiral XT603 doesn’t have a Radio but I’ve said in some older articles how that can be fixed. The Motorola Admiral XT603 also has a GPS with A-GPS support and Java via Java MIDP emulation. The only available color for the Motorola Admiral XT603 is Black.
Here is a brief list of the capabilities of the Motorola Admiral :
- MP3/WAV/WMA/AAC+ player
- MP4/WMV/H.263/H.264 player
- Google Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Google Talk
- Document viewer
- Photo viewer/editor
- Organizer
- Voice memo/dial
- Predictive text input
This concludes our little review of the Motorola Admiral XT603. If you feel that anything is lacking from this review feel free to leave your suggestion in the comments below for things which should be added and I shall be sure to take them into consideration when writing my future projects.
In the meantime, if you desire to purchase this device feel free to do so by following this link HERE.
