Motorola Citrus measures 4.1 by 2.3 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.9 ounces. It's made of rough-feeling plastic that aligns poorly around the edges; Motorola's usual high construction quality is nowhere to be found. The 3-inch glass capacitive display has only 240-by-320-pixel resolution. That's fine for feature phones, but it's terrible for Android, as it makes screens feel cramped and renders some third-party apps unusable.

Citrus includes Backtrack, Motorola's ill-conceived, rear-mounted trackpad that is difficult to use accurately and scrolls the screen by accident all the time as you hold the phone. The first thing I do when I get a phone with Backtrack is test to see if it has improved—which it never does—and then disable it.

This is not a good texting phone. The on-screen keyboard has a QWERTY format in both portrait or landscape mode. But even in landscape mode, typing was pure frustration. There was a noticeable delay after each key tap, and the Citrus missed many taps entirely, even when I slowed my typing down to a near-crawl. I haven't made this many mistakes on a texting phone in recent memory.

The Motorola Citrus is a dual-band EV-DO Rev 0 (850/1900 MHz) device with 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. The Citrus holds up Verizon's reputation for excellent voice quality. Voices sounded warm and full in the earpiece, with no background hiss. On the other side, callers said I sounded noticeably better on this handset than on an LG Octane and Pantech Crux I had on hand for comparison purposes. Calls sounded fine through an Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99, 4 stars) Bluetooth headset. The Nuance-powered voice dialing worked fine over Bluetooth; always a nice surprise on an Android phone. The speakerphone sounded tinny but went loud enough for outdoor use. Battery life was stellar at 7 hours and 36 minutes of talk time.

UI, Apps, and Messaging
Motorola seems to have signed off on a slew of budget Android devices like the Flipout, the Charm, and the Citrus without noticing or caring about how poorly Android gets along with QVGA screens. Android 2.1 is compatible with nearly all of the 100,000+ third-party apps in Android Market. But on the Citrus, large numbers of apps simply don't show up in Android Market (including our benchmark suite, for example). It's a problem throughout the device's UI, making common tasks like adding Bluetooth devices and changing settings more difficult than they need to be. Web page fonts look fuzzy. The time and length of recent calls in the call history both get chopped off. It all looks awful.

Even moving past the screen issues, there were bugs. Once, I picked up the handset and unlocked it, only to be greeted with a mostly black screen titled "Alert Messages." That's all; it was frozen. My first attempt at pairing a set of Motorola S9-HD ($129, 3.5 stars) Bluetooth headphones crashed the Citrus, requiring a reboot. Often, the main menu got stuck; scrolling became jerky and even impossible on numerous occasions for 10 to 15 seconds at a time. The photo and video gallery was a cluttered, unresponsive mess. The 528MHz processor is pretty basic, but it should have been OK given the screen's low number of pixels. The phone just seems badly programmed.

Just like on the Samsung Fascinate and similar phones, Verizon has completely removed the Citrus' default Google Search and replaced it with Bing Search—OK, but not as good as Google. If you're looking for Google Maps and Navigation, you can still download them from the Android market.

Somewhere buried in all this, the Citrus is a normal Android device with a good WebKit browser and powerful e-mail options. But by this point, who cares?

Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
The standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack makes finding good-sounding earbuds easy. My 32GB SanDisk card worked fine in the microSD slot underneath the battery cover. But pulling the cover off was an exercise in frustration and broken nails. Use doubleTwist (Free, 4 stars) and sync your media over USB with this one. There's also 170MB of free internal memory. MP3 and AAC tracks sounded clear and full over Motorola S9-HD Bluetooth headphones. Standalone MP4 and WMV video files played smoothly in full screen mode provided they were transcoded to the phone's 320-by-240-pixel landscape resolution. The music player displayed smaller album art than other Android phones, and the video player required some extra screen taps, but it all worked OK.

The 3-megapixel camera has no auto-focus or flash. I needed a tiny, flat screwdriver to get the plastic protective film off of the recessed camera lens; someone goofed in manufacturing. Test photos were clear, crisp, and colorful, with a moderate amount of grain in dimmer rooms. Recorded 352-by-288-pixel videos maxed out at 16 frames per second; they looked surprisingly clear and vibrant, if too small.

In case it's not clear yet, please don't buy the Citrus. The $49 LG Optimus S (4 stars) on Sprint and the free LG Optimus T (4 stars) on T-Mobile are far, far better budget Android devices. We're going to review Verizon's LG Vortex (which is basically the Optimus V) and MetroPCS's Optimus M pretty soon, and we're pretty sure they're going to be good, too. Finally, the LG Ally ($49, 3.5 stars) is bulkier, but its slide-out QWERTY keyboard is great for frequent texters and e-mailers, and its higher screen resolution makes it a better candidate for installing apps.


You Can Download Motorola Citrus Manual User Guide Click Here