Motorola's Budget Facebook phone, the Motokey Social

Motorola recently announced the Motokey Social, a budget Facebook phone more like the low-end Vodafone 555 Blue, than the HTC ChaCha or Salsa. What all Facebook phones share in common however, is the little-blue Facebook button on the device, a way to one-touch share on everybody’s favourite social network. The phone should start shipping by December, and for now, the company has not announced pricing details.

The Motorola Motokey Social, or Motorola EX225 is very similar in form factor to other Motorola QWERTY devices, especially the recent Charm, and the Motorola EX119 dual-SIM offering So far, consumers don’t seem too thrilled by the news, and without the popular Android operating system onboard (unlike the HTC ChaCha and Salsa), the device will mainly be for serious Facebook buffs. As you can imagine, pricing will be key, and if sufficiently low, will make the Motokey Social an attractive proposition for quite a few..

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All that is not to say the Motokey Social has nothing else going for it, with some decent feature phones specs onboard. It supports Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g connectivity, unlike the Vodafone Blue, its fellow proprietary OS-based Facebook phone. It has a 3MP fixed-focus camera, a 2.4-inch QVGA TFT touchscreen, 64MB RAM, 128MB of ROM, microSD card slot (up to 32GB), and 50MB of built-in storage.
Other features include a 3.5mm headphone jack, Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity, a microUSB port, and a 910 mAh battery rated to deliver up to 8 hours of talktime, and 28 days of standby time. It supports playback MP4 and H.263 video formats, and MP3, WAV and AAC audio formats.

All in all, the Motokey Social needs to be a budget phone that stands up to its competition by sheer rugged resilience and build quality, whilst providing a friendly Facebook interface. You might want to check out our review of the Vodafone 555 Blue, as well as the HTC ChaCha, to put things in perspective.

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