Motorola E1000

...hit the market but recently Motorola launched their latest challenger, the E1000, and it's a nifty little unit that will redefine the 3G phone market place.

Barely larger than most of the 2G phones many of us use on a daily basis, the E1000 is a phone that can easily be used day-to-day without the user feeling embarrassed to have some unusual looking piece of technology in their hand. Weighing in at 140grams the E1000 is heavier than ...
...synchronise the phonebook on the Motorola with the contacts list in Microsoft Outlook. Business tools including a calendar are also included on the phone and again will synchronise with your Outlook calendar, ensuring you take your diary with you at all times.

Of course, all this technology does come with a price and it takes its toll on the E1000's battery. Motorola state that the phone is capable of 155 hours standby and 130 minutes ... more

3G phones have been coming in for a bit of stick lately, with industry watchers still wary of the network coverage provided for 3G users and some reports have cited the phones as "still too expensive".

Hutchison Telecom were the first to bring a 3G service to the masses, introducing their network last year; Vodafone have now followed suit by launching their 3G service last month while Orange and T-Mobile are expected to launch their 3G services by the end of this year. O2, however, are rumoured to have been in touch with DoCoMo, the Japanese telecoms provider whose iMode service has been providing customers with 3G services for some time.

While consumer response to 3G might have been tepid at best, it is clear that this is the way forward for mobile communication and the services are undoubtedly expanding at a rapid rate, with Hutchison claiming that their Three network now provides full 3G coverage to 80% of the UK.

So what about the phones? Big? Bulky? Unwieldy? These have been some of the descriptions of the first wave of 3G capable phones to hit the market but recently Motorola launched their latest challenger, the E1000, and it's a nifty little unit that will redefine the 3G phone market place.

Barely larger than most of the 2G phones many of us use on a daily basis, the E1000 is a phone that can easily be used day-to-day without the user feeling embarrassed to have some unusual looking piece of technology in their hand. Weighing in at 140grams the E1000 is heavier than the average mobile but not enough to feel out of place in your pocket, while the 114x52x23 (mm) size is diminutive by 3G phone standards and is on a par, for example, with Nokia's popular 6600 phone.

Compared to the 6600, however, the E1000's capabilities are vast. Apart from being a fully capable 3G mobile phone, able to do two-way video calling with other 3G users for example, it is also a mini-entertainment system. It is the first phone of its type fitted with twin stereo speakers, mounted discreetly on either side of the phone, that deliver exceptional quality 3D stereo sound meaning that any music, news or comedy video downloaded from your 3G provider will sound almost exactly as the producer intended. The speakers are also used by the phone's full handsfree system, meaning the user can have the phone on the table and chat without having to have the phone clamped to their ear. The speaker quality is crisp and clear, loud enough the the caller at the other end can be heard clearly in most environments, while the microphone is powerful enough that even sat over a foot away on the kitchen table there is no need to shout at the phone.

Continuing the focus on those unique speakers for a moment, the phone is also a fully-fledged MP3 player so owners will be able to discard their separate music playing units and plug their headphones straight into this phone. The built-in memory is capable of holding just a handful of tunes while separate memory modules can be purchased; more on those later. The speakers, however, are once again more than capable of handling the job of playing the music or plug in the earphones provided with the phone and listen to your music privately wherever you go. With the headphones plugged in the sound is improved even further and you would be hard-pushed to realise that you were listening to MP3s on a phone rather than on a dedicated device.

As well as being used for listening to music on, the headphones also act as the phone's handsfree kit should you wish them to, with a button on the cable for answering and making calls and a built-in microphone so that you can leave the phone in your pocket while taking a call. The phone will interrupt the MP3 player should a call come in while you're listening to your music and you'll hear the person at the other end in perfect stereo - it's one of the best handsfree kids I've ever come across.

On top of MP3s, the phone's entertainment software is also capable of playing MPEG4 videos, either downloaded from the 3G provider or installed to the memory via a PC, meaning long train journeys are no longer dull. Bored of listening to music or watching videos? Simply fire up one of the myriad of games you can install on the phone, utilising the E1000's full Java capabilities. Personalise the phone further by downloading new wallpapers and themes to it, ensuring you stamp your own fingerprint on the phone's background.

There's no need to carry a separate digital camera any more, either. The E1000 is fitted with two 1.2mega pixel lenses capable of taking digital photographs or recording 10 second videos with sound. The camera has a built-in light for improving dark environments and an 8x digital zoom.

Of course, all of this takes up memory and the phone comes as standard with just 16mb of memory on board. This is sufficient for every day phone use, but if you start installing games, music tracks and MPEG4 videos this will swiftly disappear. The memory can be expanded by purchasing additional memory cards. The memory format used by the E1000 is TransFlash, a standard not commonly used in most portable devices and making the E1000 incompatible with thousands of memory devices. While PDAs, cameras and some other mobile phones all use SD Cards or, in some cases, Sony's MemoryStick format, the TransFlash format remains proprietary and many memory card readers will be unable to read from the TransFlash device. However, as an upgrade option to simply increase the memory of your phone it is more than capable and any images or tracks stored on your phone can be quickly transferred to a computer via Bluetooth or USB cable connections.

Disappointingly, this phone does not include an infrared port for data transfer, but is one of the first 3G phones to include Bluetooth for wireless data communication with other Bluetooth devices such as laptops and media entertainment centres; alternatively, a USB cable can be purchased separately for connecting to your computer. Regardless of whether you use Bluetooth or a USB cable, the PhoneSuite software that comes with the E1000 is a doddle to use and allows you to synchronise the phonebook on the Motorola with the contacts list in Microsoft Outlook. Business tools including a calendar are also included on the phone and again will synchronise with your Outlook calendar, ensuring you take your diary with you at all times.

Of course, all this technology does come with a price and it takes its toll on the E1000's battery. Motorola state that the phone is capable of 155 hours standby and 130 minutes talk time, though I barely got 24 hours use out of it when I first took delivery. Whilst most manufacturer's standby statistics are based on the phone literally sitting in standby for 155 hours without being touched, this is simply not realistic in the real world. Being a reasonably heavy mobile user my use of the E1000, even without using the person-to-person video calling services, I find myself recharging the phone's battery every 48 hours on average. Use the MP3 player frequently or watch videos on the phone and you'll find you're charging daily, but this is the downside of most 3G phones as they are expected to do an awful lot of work on a standard mobile phone battery.

All of this functionality aside, however, what is it like to use? Motorolas in the past have been renowned as having poor user interfaces but the E1000 puts that gripe to rest. There are four buttons on either side of the display that provide one-touch access to certain functions on the phone, such as 3G services, the camera, recently dialled calls, volume and also the answer/end-call buttons. The keypad has large buttons that are easy to use but most of the functionality is accessed via the small joystick, placed awkwardly between the number 2 and 5 keys; it's okay when using the joystick but when trying to type in a telephone number or a text the joystick can get in the way.

Ignore this, though, and you'll quickly find the icon-driven menu very easy to use. You can set four quick-access buttons on the standby screen to be able to activate your most-used functions by simply flicking the joystick once. For example, mine is set-up so that pushing the joystick UP accesses the multimedia features, RIGHT the office tools (calendar, calculator etc.), DOWN the phonebook and LEFT the text message menu. Alternatively, push the joystick in and the full menu comes up, a clear icon-system of twelve options that give you access to all the phone's functionality; similar to the SonyEricsson system that was then emulated by Nokia on their 6600 and other phones. It gives the phone a PDA feel and is quite intuitive once you get used to it. This isn't as easy a phone to get used to the T610 by SonyEricsson, for example, or the well-loved menu systems of most Nokia mobiles, and it takes a little while to get the hang of most of the systems, not least the text messaging interface.

While Nokia and SonyEricsson user a derivative of the T9 dictionary for their text messaging, Motorola still insist on using iTap for their predictive texts. It works well, but it's cumbersome and doesn't allow for easy insertion of new words or correcting miss-spelled words.

All-in-all, it took almost four days for me to get used to the phone. Being a typical man I held off from opening the instruction manual for as long as possible but by the end of day one I was reaching for it simply to figure out how to make a call to a person in the phonebook, the contents of which can be personalised so that entries have their own photograph or dedicated ringtone assigned to them.

This shouldn't be taken as a negative, however. 3G phones are different to the everyday 2G units we're all used to at the moment and so there will be a learning curve whichever model you go for. If you're considering a change to 3G, however, then the E1000 is a must for your pocket and it looks, and sounds, funky too. The unit I have was purchased from e2save.co.uk, the phone was free on the Three network's Talk & Text 600 package, which for £30 p/mth provides 500 cross-network minutes at any time and 100 texts per month.

Now I'm off to set-up the ringtone on my phone - no more the polyphonic tunes that annoy your colleagues in the office, this thing has the ability to play full MP3 tracks when a call is received. My dilemma now is do I pick Shakin' Stevens, Merry Christmas Everyone, or Black Lace's Agadoo? 

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