Motorola Rival a rival to no one
Motorola's latest attempt at a messaging phone is the Motorola Rival, which is exclusive to Verizon Wireless. It has a sideways-sliding design similar to the LG Neon, and also like the Neon, has a display that acts as a touch screen only for the phone dialer. We're not entirely convinced this is a great idea--why not just make the whole display touch-sensitive?--but we suppose it's OK.
The Rival is ultimately marred by its bad navigation array. The buttons are all rather stiff and hard to press, which makes it a pain to do simple tasks like going through a menu. We also were displeased with the rather lackluster display. So even though the Rival has pretty good features like EV-DO, a 2-megapixel camera, a music player, GPS, stereo Bluetooth, and even a 3.5-mm headset jack, we just can't recommend it in the end because of its design flaws.
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Nicole Lee is an associate editor for CNET, covering cell phones, Bluetooth headsets, and all things mobile. She's also pretty geeky--she likes World of Warcraft, comic books, and shiny gadgets. E-mail Nicole. 
