Why You Can Trust CNET Mojo Chat review: Mojo Chat
The Mojo Chat aims to be a BlackBerry on a budget, but it's just cheap and nasty. It feels like it should be given away with a pack of cereal. Avoid it as you would a punch in the face.
The Mojo Chat is a budget phone with BlackBerry-style aspirations, but its quality is as low as its price. Even the kids this phone is clearly aimed at will stick their noses up at its tacky exterior and awkward features.
Mojo Chat
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The Chat is available for around £25 on a pay as you go deal, exclusively from Tesco.
Case and keyboard
The Chat's designers clearly hope that whatever magic made BlackBerry handsets popular will rub off on this pitiful pay as you go offering. The Chat certainly needs it, because it's not a phone that makes a promising first impression.
The cheap glossy case has all the class and elegance of a wet weekend in Blackpool, and the device's appearance is hardly likely to cause your heart to flutter. The chrome-effect buttons under the screen look incredibly tacky, too.
Even the phone's major selling point -- its Qwerty keyboard -- is a let-down. The keys are raised, which makes them easy to tap, but they're far too close together, and you'll often find yourself accidentally pressing two at once.
To make matters worse, the buttons emit a horrible clicking sound when pressed. Although the keyboard certainly improves your overall typing speed, it's not particularly pleasant to use, and it's a far cry from the BlackBerry standard that the Chat seeks so hard to emulate.
Software
Once you've got over the Chat's off-putting appearance, you'll be ready for the second wave of disappointment. The Chat's operating system is reasonably straightforward to use, but almost every activity is harder than it should be.
With all those buttons plastered on its front, you'd expect the Chat to offer at least some form of email functionality, but it doesn't. There's the option to install email programs via the phone's Java system, but we couldn't get Google's Gmail Java app to work, no matter how hard we tried -- and we consider ourselves to be pretty knowledgeable about mobile phones.
No 3G or Wi-Fi
With email out of the question, you're stuck with text messaging and the grisly prospect of sending email via the phone's archaic Web browser. No 3G or Wi-Fi connectivity means you only have GPRS data transfer to rely on -- and the passage of time hasn't made it any faster, in case you were wondering. Bluetooth is supported for local file exchanges, however.
Facebook and Twitter
The Chat also attempts to offer social-networking features, with dedicated Twitter and Facebook apps pre-baked into the OS. Predictably, neither works especially well. In fact, we found several attempts were required to successfully sign into Twitter, and scrolling through your timeline is like wading through a lake of treacle. The Twitter and Facebook apps may as well not even be installed.
Camera
With a 1.3-megapixel camera, the Chat's photographic skills are almost laughably outdated. Still, many budget phones, like the Samsung E1080 and Nokia C1-02, don't even include a snapper.
Although the phone is capable of capturing video, the appalling fuzziness of the footage means it's often impossible to actually make out what's going on. Still images are similarly poor, with loads of noise and dim, washed-out colours.
Connectivity
Confusingly, the Chat comes with what appears to be two charging ports. The first also doubles as a data-transfer port and a socket for the bundled pair of headphones. The second socket resides on the base of the device, yet no lead is included that fits the hole.
To make matters even more bizarre, the Chat has a headphone port on its left-hand side, but it's smaller than the standard 3.5mm connection, so you'll need to buy a special pair of cans to make use of it. There's no explanation in the supplied manual as to what these additional ports are for.
What is included in the box is a 2GB microSD card, which allows you to store images, music and other items on the handset. A built-in music player handles formats such as MP3, AAC, AMR and WAV.
Conclusion
The Mojo Chat is clearly aimed at younger users. But, while it's fine for texting and making calls, the rest of the phone's functionality is so half-baked that most kids will want to happy slap it into oblivion. When you consider that there are proper Android smart phones out there for around £50 to £80, the Mojo Chat seems even more pointless.
If you really crave a Qwerty keyboard on a budget, we recommend you save up a little longer and opt for something better, like the Orange Rio 2 or LG Optimus Chat.
Edited by Charles Kloet