Review: Motorola i1
The i1 uses the stock Android music player. I am tired of this software, and I was hoping Motorola would dress the player up a little bit, as it has for other Android devices. It didn't.
The player on the i1 gave me all sorts of trouble. It crashed constantly. I didn't have trouble with any other application on the phone, just the music app. It crashed so often, I was barely able to get through a single song without experiencing a problem.
Other than the crashy-ness, the i1 is reasonably hassle-free to deal with. The i1 comes with no PC software to help with sideloading songs. That means you have to resort to USB mass storage mode (which works fine), or download a third-party client, such as doubleTwist. This is what I've been doing of late.
Once music is loaded, you can sort through Artists, Albums, Genres, and Songs. The i1 does one thing that infuriates me. It lists music within albums alphabetically and not in the order that the artist created. So if you have tracks starting with A, or B, or C, they will be the first, even if numerically they are tracks 7, or 8, or 9. Really maddening. This means if you listen to an album from start to finish, it will be all out of order. Just a pet peeve.
There are no advanced features that I could detect. Most — but not all — of the album art came through. The player itself is unchanged from Android 1.0. Music playback through the speakerphone was surprisingly awful. Distortion city. It sucked.
Since I don't have a 2.5mm-to-3.5mm adapter, I resorted to using stereo Bluetooth headphones. These actually worked pretty well.