BlackBerry Motion Review

Telephony

The BlackBerry Motion will come in single and dualSIM configurations. Our review unit is the Latin/North America unlocked version, which has a single nanoSIM slot. The dialer is nothing unique -there are a few tabs for favorites, a call log, and a tab for contacts.

Dialer • Favorites • Call Log • Contacts • In-call screen

SMS

Android Messages is the default SMS application for Android. You can expect a pretty straightforward SMS experience with plenty of sharing options. Android Messages has slowly gained some nifty features over the past several months like sticker packs (similar to Allo), sending and requesting money (via Google Wallet), and basic location sharing.

Conversation view • New conversation view • In-conversation media options

The message threads are randomly assigned colors on a per-contact basis. You can edit each of these colors to your liking or you can assign a unique notification sound. If Android Messages is too simple for you, there is a vast collection of third-party SMS apps that give you control over every aspect of SMS for chronic texters.

Individual conversation options • Conversation colors • Android Messages settings

BlackBerry Keyboard: autocorrect done right

BlackBerry offers an in-house virtual keyboard solution with a very unique approach to auto-correct. Rather than displaying the predicted word in a row of two or three suggestions, the keyboard will show predicted words all over the keyboard. All the user has to do is swipe up on a letter with the predicted word. If you want to accept the suggested correction for a misspelled word, it will be right on the space bar.

BlackBerry Keyboard's predictive suggestions

The BlackBerry Keyboard is laid out quite functionally and practically. A swipe from the left will display a list of pre-written or canned messages. A swipe from the right shows a number pad which slides out of sight when it's not being used.

Pre-written quick replies • Number pad

Finally, along the top of the keyboard are some functions laid out in tabs. The first one is for voice typing, the next one is Emojis, the keyboard itself, and then there's a directional pad with copy and paste shortcuts. The last tab keeps a list of things recently copied into the clipboard for easy retrieval.

Voice to text • Emoji • Keyboard • Text editing and copy/paste shortcuts • Clipboard

Much like on the KEYone, adding a multi-lingual keyboard option is a little cumbersome. Head to the BlackBerry settings and look for "Languages and Input" > "Keyboard Settings" > "BlackBerry Keyboard" > "Multi-language keyboards". From here, you can select up to two supporting languages that will supplement your primary language.

Once you do this, you need to enable the newly created multi-language keyboard in the BlackBerry Keyboard settings.

Setting up a multi-language keyboard

Loudspeaker

The Motion has a single downward-firing speaker next to its charging port. It's loud enough to hear an alert or ringtone in noisy office environments, but that's about it. Thankfully, we didn't experience any distortion when we put the phone on the highest volume. Otherwise, the quality of sound from the small loudspeaker is average - comparable to a Samsung flagship phone's.

The BlackBerry Motion's loudspeaker scored "Good" in our loudness test. You can see how it fared against other smartphones down below. While it's not the best scoring phone around, it got fairly good numbers in the Ring test, which is important for a workhorse like the BlackBerry Motion.

Next we'll take a look at the different apps for consuming media that come standard on the BlackBerry Motion. You'll want to definitely use that pair of bundled earbuds for that.