Motorola Grasp

Motorola Grasp

The Motorola Grasp is a decent little feature phone on U.S. Cellular. It's tiny, it's cute, and it's free after a $50 mail-in rebate. It's a good choice if you like to text, though its basic multimedia features leave a bit to be desired. One of my coworkers spotted the Grasp near my computer and said, "Oh look, it's a cute little baby BlackBerry." While the Grasp is most certainly not a BlackBerry, you can't deny the resemblance. It has a nice full QWERTY keyboard as well as an optical trackpad directly below the display, which really opens the door to BlackBerry comparisons. At 3.7 by 2.4 by .53 inches, the phone is short and a little squat. It feels relatively solid, if a bit downmarket. Motorola has chosen an oddly asymmetric design, in which the face of the phone is offset slightly to the right. I repeatedly found myself wishing the face would just somehow center itself. The 2.2-inch display has a disappointingly low 220-by-176 resolution. It's sharp enough for messaging, but images and video looked washed out and grainy. The Grasp is a tri-band EV-DO Rev 0 (850/1700/1900 MHz) 3G device with no Wi-Fi. Voice quality was OK, but not great. Voices sounded a bit fuzzy in the earpiece, but loud enough and completely understandable.