At last a good motorola
 Apr 18th, 2005
(Apr 28th, 2005)
Advantages:
PDA phone, which is small .
Disadvantages:
Cant hear Incoming calls .
Recommendable:
Yes
Detailed rating:
Look & Feel
Durability & Robustness
Battery standby time
Value for money
Range of features
more
  David_Scutt
About me:
Member since:22.03.2005
Reviews:7
Members who trust:1
Review rated by 19 Ciao members on average: helpful 
This review received a counterstatement by a party concerned
Read Comment
---My experiance with Motorola---
I have been with three for a whole year now, and have gone through 3x Motorola A835
1x Motorola A925
So what happened? Well my first a835 stopped working, just crashed, my second would not send text messages and my 3rd kept loosing the signal. Not to mention battery life, it needed charging every 2 days, and after every voice call.
My a925 had even worse battery life of 1 day, straight from the box. Also both of them are brick sized. ---A convert from Nokia?---
Now I have the A1000. I have had it a month and its brilliant. It is the size of an actual mobile phone, it has all the features, it comes with a desktop charger .... BRILLIANT idea, you just come home, and put it on the stand, and it charges, easier then finding a plug socket. Only problem is it only comes with one charger, it would be useful to have two, one for the base station and another to carry with you.
It has all the features as a small Palm PDA with the ability of being able to open small word documents. But unlike a PDA, the way you input letters is annoying, I find I always use the onscreen keyboard.
I have just tested my battery life, I have managed 5 days without charging, which included sending multiple texts. One problem is the volume, all motorola's for some reason suffer from not being able to hear the
person on the other end of the phone easily.
as an MP3 player you can add a small multimedia memory card to the phone, which can store extra photos, games and movies. The sound quality with the headphones is excellent. But as an MP3 player, suffers from having the battery life of a phone, you can get 13 hours from an Ipod or a portable MP3 player. It is sufficient to get you to work, listening to music, and back home again, where a recharge using the docking station is necessary. Syncronisation takes to long, and is complex, unlike an Ipod or a portable Windows media player, you cant simply plug it in and upload tracks, you have to use the software provided by motorola. Plus if you loose the cd, thats it, you cant download the software from the motorola or three website.
The provided software is rubbish. It doesnt automatically syncronise, you have to dock the phone open up the software on the computer, and then try and navigate through the phones settings to turn on syncronisation. But you have to of remembered to remove the stylus (pen) before docking as it is situated at the bottom of the phone. The lock function is a plus, and a first on a phone, like most sony walkmans, you have a slider switch that can lock the phone and unlock the phone. this saves a huge amount of time, of pressing two keypad buttons at the same time, followed by an optional password.
Like most all in phones it suffers from the occasional self reset. however this time unlike the A925 it does not reset during a phone call, or when you try to use it. With so many features, the phones menu system is complex, setting the alarm is difficult, and changing your tones is equally complicated.
However the alarm is reliable, you can set the alarm and turn your phone off, if you want. You can also set the alarm using Microsoft outlook, once you have managed to sync the phone. You can manage you contacts, and appointments, using the phone or Microsoft Outlook and sync them together.
Quite simply, a cheaply built machine, which shows, but is far superior to its predecessors. It claims the phone can connect to the internet, unfortunately 3 for some reason have disabled this feature, and you can only visit 3 sites.
It also claims an AGPS feature, which can track your posistion using sattelites, this feature unlike GPS costs 25p a time, so I have not used it. If you had adequate space, you can record films on your computer, shrink them to the size of the Motorola screen and upload them to your phone, to watch on the train. However the software supplied with the phone will only allow you to move the movie file across, it will not shrink the file for you. For example a typical simpsons episode takes up 256Mb using Divx, you first need to encode it to another format, and you need to shrink the file size to about 60mb. Using 3rd party programmes. Uploading 60mb to the phone takes a long time.
Im still unsure on how voice activated dialling works. I find it quicker to type the number in. The speaker phone can be loud, which is a good thing when you want the whole room to talk to the other person.
You can send/recieve emails from your pop3 account, however this costs 10p, and depends on size of the email, so you may pay 10p for recieving junk mail! However you can send emails using the 3Mail service over 3g which is free (this also costs 10p by using the non 3g route) ---Features----
MP3 / CAMERA / VIDEO (Capture, Send, Stream)
Document Viewer (you cant edit)
Alert types : MP3, Polyphonic Ringtones & space for downloads
J2ME Games : J2ME embedded & space for downloads
Integrated digital camera with 4x digital zoom
Video Capture, playback, streaming, download, point 2 point
Voice Activated Dialling
In-built Hands-free Speaker Phone
MMS (Picture / photo + text + sound)
EMS 5.0 ( Whatever that is)
A-GPS (Assisted Global Positioning Services)
PIM functionality (Again what is this?)
Tri-band
Claimed Standby Time : up to 200 hours
Claimed Talktime : up to 225 mins Expandable Memory
GPRS : Class 101
WAP ( Not supported by 3)
Connectivity : USB/Bluetooth
Form Factor - PDA
Internal Memory : 24MB (expandable)
Colour : Grey
Dimensions (H x W x D) : 116 x 57.5 x 20 mm
Volume : 115 cc
Weight : 160 g
External Display : 208 x 320, 65k colours TFT, activevmatrix touch-screen
---Conclusion ---
I must confess I always opt for a Nokia option, unfortunately Nokia is no longer at the forefront of technology, and is missing out on the 3G market, so I could not choose Nokia. This is probably because all 3G phones suffer from one thing in common, Load up time. It takes about the same time to load up your pc as it does for 3G phones to turn on. This phone with all its features though will give Nokia a run for its money. However if Nokia offered a phone like this, I would go for the Nokia.
Good Points
- Battery life compared to predecessor
- Speed at which you can type texts
- Base Station
- Touch Screen
- Size
- Ability to Upload small movies to the phone.
- The best 3 Phone avaliable
- Big Screen Bad Points
- Volume
- Syncronisation
- Lack of second charger
- Confusing setup menus
- Ability to hold a signal
- Time to upload/Sync
- 24Mb of onboard memory, you definately need a memory card, being a small size memory card these are more expensive and difficult to buy, as they are new.
So Software I give 1 Star
Ease of installing Software 1 Star Quality of phone 4 Stars
Battery life 3 Stars
Quality of Voice calls 3 Stars
Read more on this product
Products you might be interested in
Related tags for Motorola A1000
|
|
by (5%):
by (21%):
28.06.2005 03:13
Great review will be ordering this phone on the weekend as my free upgrade. Cheers for the info.
21.05.2005 19:29
I was thinking about getting this as an upgrade, sounds quite good. Dan
17.05.2005 11:49
I love MOTO products. Nicola X