In what’s turned into a trilogy of Virgin Mobile Android handsets, let’s turn our attention to the Motorola Triumph.
Heftier than the Wildfire S, the Triumph’s 5.04 oz bulk is easy to ignore thanks to the 4.1″ screen. The screen is much better than the other choices on Virgin. Note that caveat. If you run the mere 480 x 800 pixels on the Triumph up against the AMOLED on the original Samsung Galaxy or Apple’s Retina Display, you notice a difference right away and it won’t be in the Triumph’s favor. However, because none of those higher-end screen technologies have trickled down to any pre-pay handsets as far as I know, you shouldn’t lose that much sleep.
Far, far more irksome would be the handset being on Android 2.2 (Froyo). Considering that Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) just had it’s big coming out party and even the weaker Wildfire S, which runs 2.3 (Gingerbread), the Triumph having an older Android version is certainly a disappointment.
The about screen. It MOCKS ME.
I’m not one of those people who clucks like Chicken Little about Android fragmentation and this may seem like quibbling, but the longer Froyo ages, the better the odds are of running into an application that won’t run on your Triumph. The good news is that if you do care about that you’re also the kind of person who would check out XDA-Developers and find one of the many clever and apparently not insanely difficult solutions to get Gingerbread on the Triumph.
With the technical gobbledygook out of the way, I have to say that the Triumph is surprisingly useful. The screen was responsive and easy to use, and while they only include a 2 GB MicroSD card for storage, that’s quickly replaced by the card of your choice.
Assuming your card of choice is no larger than 32 GB
I’m impressed with the devices standby time. Rated at 300 hours, it’s the first smartphone I’ve had in a while that I could leave unplugged over the weekend, polling my e-mail constantly. When I say over the weekend, I mean that I had it unplugged from early Friday morning to almost mid day on the following Monday. That impressed the heck out of me. When used more actively, the Triumph lasted most of my day — as long as I kept location services off. That’s normally a battery killer and nothing changed this time.
The rear facing 5 MP camera takes average shots and the front facing is good enough should you decide to make a video call. Voice call quality was fine.
In reviewing all these no-contract smartphones, I’m seeing that the technology in them is usually two to three years behind the bleeding edge. The Triumph’s aging operating system and weaker screen are offset by it being the one phone on Virgin matching the current trend towards larger screens. If you’re looking for a phone without a contract and are willing to accept that you may have to stick your own ROM (like an operating system image) on there at some point to get it current, I can think of a heck of a lot of worse choices.
[…] is that the available phones were not much to write home about. Sure, the HTC Wildfire and Motorola Triumph are good basic phones, but they’re very 2009. Where are the phones with high-end screens, 4G, […]