Tech Digest

Motorola A925, A1000, E1000 review

Late last year Moto execs promised journalists that the 2004 range of 3G phones would look more like GPRS handsets than the 3G handsets currently on sale.

Well judging by the Motorola 3G handsets launched this week - to say nothing of the upcoming NEC e616 and LG U8100/8150 - they were half right.

While the phones, the A925, A1000 and E1000 (above) have clearly shrunk in size it is clearly not going to be until 2005 before the difference between 3G and GPRS handsets is marginal.

Our first impression of the Motorola A925 is why bother? Essentially its a funkier version of the Symbian OS based A920 the brick-like 3G phone that Moto/Three debuted at the end of 2003. There are a couple of differences - it has a faster processor which did speed up accessing the handset's many features, also it apparently has working Bluetooth a feature denied owners of the A920.

However it is likely to be subject to the odd restrictions of Three in the UK - so many of its best features - downloading large POP3 e-mail files/attachments, browsing the web at lightning speeds, taking advantage of 3G to surf the web on a laptop, will be nobbled.

Sure the phone delivers great quality video and its GPS features are very impressive, but there are not enough 'activated' features for us to find pocket space for it.

Debuted for the first time in Cannes this week the A1000 is a close relative of the 920/925. Once again it has the same operating system (Symbian) and the same awesome line up of applications. The form factor is slightly different as the screen appears larger and the size of the handset significantly smaller. Another plus is that it also includes a 1.2 mega pixel camera.

Hopefully by the time it launches in autumn 2004 it will be available on several networks (Orange seems a good bet) where all its cool features will be enabled.

Perhaps the best phone Moto launched in Cannes is the E1000. Easily the cutest, and quite possibly the smallest 3G handset unveiled so far (with video calling) it is a candy bar style phone that looks like a slightly larger version of the Sony Ericsson T610. The features line up is similar to the existing A835 with the addition of a 1.2-mega-pixel camera. It should do well when it debuts in the autumn.

Finally some good news for Moto about the A835. Apparently it has been chosen by Orange as the launch phone for its 3G service when it debuts in the summer. Also, accordiong to Moto, the A835 was also the best selling contract phone on any network, in the first month of 2004. How many of those buyers who bought the phone to take advantage of Three’s ultra cheap voice calls, use its sophisticated line up of messaging and video facilities remains to be seen.

You will probably be seeing a whole lot more A835s in our neighbourhood soon as the phone has been chosen as the handset to launch Three’s incredibly cheap pay as you go service.

Sendo snapper

3GSM was a busy one for British mobile phone company Sendo. It not only extended its portfolio of handsets by introducing a new mid-range camera phone, but also spent the show touting around its Symbian based smartphone the X

The camera phone looks a goodie and should appeal to the mid to bottom end of the market. Christened the S600 the small candy bar style handset is set to debut in European market later in the spring.

Unlike many rival devices it boasts a VGA quality camera with a 5x digital zoom and creative and editing facilities. Images can be viewed on a 65k colour display. Other features include the most recent form of Java (MIDP 2.0) to enable games and applications to be downloaded and polyphonic ringtones. Talk time is between two and seven hours with standby rated at 200-450 hours.

While it is undoubtedly a decent-looking feature rich phone, it appears that the Sendo X hasn’t got quite the pull the company had hoped it would have. So far Sendo only has one operator lined up to sell the X and that's Telecom Italia. None of the big Europe-wide networks like Orange, Vodafone and T-Mobile have signed on the dotted line.

It is not that there is anything wrong with phone. It could well be that there is a glut of smartphones available and quite possibly not as many punters as the networks had hoped buying them.

Creating better photo messages

One of the key problems mobile phone networks are wrestling with at the moment is how to make money from photo messaging. While camera phones have become ubiquitous it appears that users prefer to use them as digital photo albums rather than send pictures to their friends and colleagues.

Not surprisingly then 3GSM was awash with software that added value to sending photo messages to make them sexier. Two caught our eye.

The first enables camera phone owners to add handwritten notes to their photo messages.

Using the software developed by French company Real Eyes phone users simply write the note on plain paper and then take a picture of it.

The message can then be placed anywhere on an image to create, for example, wish you were here style postcards.

The style and colour of the handwritten text can also be manipulated. The company demonstrated the software on phones running the Symbian operating system (as used on Nokia/Siemens smartphones) but adds that it will work with most mobile devices.

Meanwhile a UK based company, QinetiQ, is hoping to offer camera phone owners the opportunity of creating panoramic style images. Designed to enable phone owners to take group snaps or wide landscape shots, the images can be displayed on the phone or printed.

Both have a reasonable chance of attracting consumers if networks or handset manufacturers choose to embed them on their phones.

More on Real Eyes here and QinetiQ here.

Moto's new smartphones

Motorola launched two new handsets in its MPx series of Microsoft Windows Mobile powered smartphones at 3GSM in Cannes, but they weren't the phones many industry observers had expected.

Until a few weeks ago the clever money had been on an upgraded version of the MPx200 clamshell based smartphone, with Motorola adding an integrated camera and Bluetooth to the phone's line up of facilities.

Instead the company surprised observers by introducing the MPx - its high-end smartphone for the business market for 2004.

The handset boasts two key features. Firstly it is the first Motorola model to offer web browsing via Wi-Fi as well as GPRS - Nokia's Wi-Fi equipped handset, the Communicator 9500, was unveiled earlier in the week.

Secondly the phone’s form factor is completely unlike almost any other mobile - and more akin to the company’s paging devices of half a decade ago.

The MPx features a laptop-style clamshell design with a screen that can be used in either landscape or portrait mode. Essentially when the user is making phone calls it operates as portrait style clamshell model. When accessing data applications, such as e-mail or web browsing, the user flips the phone open in a vertical way.

Writing e-mail is via a full QWERTY keyboard, which we found a little tricky to use as the keys were too small.

In addition to Bluetooth and an MP3 player and all the traditional Windows based applications like Pocket Internet Explorer and Outlook, the handset also boasts a 1.2 mega pixel camera. This should make Motorola the second company to offer a snapper of this high quality standard to the UK market. Accompanying the camera is an integrated flash.

Due in the UK around the same time is a second slightly lower specified Windows powered handset - the MPx100. The phone boasts a traditional candy bar style form factor, features a 1.2 mega pixel camera, Bluetooth, MP3 player and the usual Microsoft applications.

Although the features list whetted our appetite - especially the Wi-Fi - we were unconvinced by the form factor (the phone is too tall for a standard clamshell) and the keyboard on the MPx. The MPx100 does however look like a strong contender and should certainly tempt the kind of phone buyer who is considering Orange's SPV.

Overall, we would have liked to have seen the revamped MPX200. Its clamshell form factor is superbly executed and the Microsoft applications work well. The addition of the camera and Bluetooth would make it a compelling proposition.

Second Palm smartphone

Palm Source, the new name for the section of Palm that develops the PDA's operating system (OS), continued its attempts at 3GSM to push Palm as an OS for mobile phones. It had some success to for a second mobile phone that runs using Palm (the first, the Handspring Treo 600 launched in December) is heading for Europe and the UK in late spring.

Manufactured by Group Sense, which has a huge presence in the Asian mobile market, the G88 combines Palm personal organiser style facilities with a mobile phone in a candy bar style handset with a sliding keypad not dissimilar to the Samsung SGH-D410.

The phone, which runs via Palm Source’s 4.1.2 operating system, features an integrated digital camera, 2.2inch 65k colour screen, e-mail and Java. It boasts 16MB RAM, 16MB ROM and a 2MB internal flash memory card.

We really liked the Palm OS on the Treo, but are not yet convinced as to whether it will function on the G88's smaller screen. More from here

Blackberry e-mail for Sony Ericsson P900

Personally we wouldn’t give a Blackberry device house space as they look awful and don’t feature niceties like web browsing and music and video playback.

We would however kill for a version of Blackberry innovative e-mail software on our favourite mobile phones (02's XDA, Orange’s Treo 600/SPV E-200).

Well, now we may have to consider investing a Sony Ericsson P900 once again for at 3GSM Blackberry’s parent company, Research in Motion (RIM), announced its intention to roll out its Blackberry e-mail solution to owners of SE’s P900 smartphone.

The Blackberry device has become a huge hit, especially in the US, thanks to its potent combination of always on connectivity and ‘push technology.’ This means that the device’s e-mail system automatically senses when a server has received a new message and then sends it to the device without the user having to dial up.

The software, which requires the back up of Blackberry’s Enterprise Server and the Blackberry Web Client to be integrated onto the device, will be launched to both enterprise and individual users of the Sony Ericsson P900 later this year.

It puts the Sony Ericsson in a powerful position of sporting the best web browser for phones in the Opera browser and now the best e-mail system. RIM has already announced that future Nokia and Samsung handsets will also feature Blackberry e-mail solutions as an option.

Apple iPod mini arrives (err in the US)

Apple’s iPod mini went on sale in the US at the end of last week, so not surprisingly the first reviews of the ultra small four gigabyte hard disk based MP3 player are filtering through. There’s a neat little preview here from PC World.

The key issue for us Brits is how much will the player cost. It retails for $249 in the US, which should put it in the £200 camp in the UK. Anything more and it would start to look rather poor value for money when up against both 1-2 Gig players from Philips and Creative and the cheaper 15-20 gig jukeboxes.

Of course if you can’ wait until April to buy one you can score one fairly cheaply here.

Orange considers pre-pay 3G

It appears it isn’t just Three who has an eye on tempting punters to upgrade to 3G phones via cheap voice calls on pre-pay cards. Orange has plans in this area too.

Aware of the fact that 3G data features (like video downloads and video calls) don’t appear too popular with phone buyers’ Orange’s Chief Operating Officer Sanjiv Ahuja told Reuters that would look at it (a prepay service)" as part of a long-delayed range of high-speed, third-generation (3G) multimedia phones it plans to start selling in the second half of the year.

Panny shrinks the smartphone

We’ve seen a few compact smartphones recently that use the Symbian operating system. Nokia's 6600, Sendo’s X and Siemens SX1 leap to mind. Panasonic is set to shrink the Symbian smartphone even smaller with its X700 clamshell phone that it announced at 3GSM in Cannes this week.

The key to the model (which uses the Series 60 interface along with the Symbian OS) size is that it uses a mini Secure Digital (SD) card, rather than the standard SD one used by its rivals. This enables Panasonic to shave a few extra millimetres from the size of the handset.

In terms of its specifications though the X700 is arguably more 2003 than 2004. It has a 65k colour screen and VGA camera rather than the 260k colour screen and mega pixel snappers offered by Panasonic’s rivals Sharp, Motorola and LG.

It is compatible with the usual range of Microsoft applications from PowerPoint to Word, has an integrated POP3 email client, Java and Bluetooth. There’s no mention of an integrated Web browser (it has WAP) but users who want to view websites will probably download the excellent Opera web browser for Symbian handsets.

The bad news though is that the model is not expected to debut until the end of 2004, buy which time a whole raft of new exciting and better-specified handsets will have been launched.

Aiwa (Sony) MP3 players hit Europe

At CES we wrote about a range of MP3 players from Aiwa that we thought looked pretty impressive. They were also unusual in that for Aiwa read Sony. The two companies, which were always very close, are now in fact one and the same. So while Sony officially won’t sully itself by launching players that use the MP3 format, rather than its copyright secure ATRAC, it can at least dip a toe in the MP3 water using its budget brand.

Anyway it now appears that the two hard disk players – the HZ-DS2000 and HZ-WS2000 - will be debuting in Europe in April.

The HZ-WS2000 a 2Gigabyte (36 hours of tunes) player is the one that caught our eye in that it houses a one-inch hard drive. Its USP is that it is incredibly thin, much more slight than the forthcoming Apple mini iPod.

Aiwa’s second hard disk player, the HZ-DS2000 , is targeted at sport types. It has a rubberised edge to protect it should it be dropped and excellent shockproof facilities courtesy of a buffer system that runs for an amazing twenty minutes.

Both players could do well if they sell for les than the price of the iPod mini, which would mean they would have to be in the £160-200 price bracket.

Aiwa also unveiled its Pavit range of players that feature integrated USB connectors. The AZ-RS256 is a rugged slashproof model with 256MB of storage, while the AZ-ES265 is a smarter looking device for less-energetic types.

Perhaps the most interesting model in the range is the AZ-HS256 an MP3 player integrated into a pair of headphones.

All the Pavit models are expected in late spring. No price details yet.