Horizons - Filled with Hope

I finally got my new mobile on Monday. Motorola L7. Obviously was upbeat about it. Thought its time for a preliminary analysis. So here goes…

When I opened the box (cool design I shd say about the box, slides out both ways :D) and saw the phone, my first thought was WOW!!!. Its really really slim and all that..perfect eye-candy. Then I held it and again was impressed with the light weight.

Inserting the SIM, memory card and battery was not too much of a problem. Time to switch it on. WOW!!! Again. Excellent screen. It took me quite some time to explore the features. Then suddenly remembered that my PC@home was down (old chap.. gotta perform plastic surgery on him). So had to wait till next day to install the PC software on my laptop and connect it.

Next day at office, downloaded some stunning wallpapers and a few songs and transferred them to the phone. Took few pics and a video recording, but discarded most of them cuz wasn’t satisfied (not with the quality but with the content J ). Tried out bluetooth. Then used the PC software to cut a couple of MP3 ringtones and then had to turn my attention to work L. Was really happy with the quality of MP3. Hadn’t expected much from the camera, but it dint disappoint [the pic is a snap i took of my laptop wallpaper]. Also searched for free applications to download. Found one but not free, so decided to write it myself ;) [it’s a fuel efficiency calculator.. started working on it already].

Now started rummaging through the box to check out what else is there. Other than the 128 MB memory card, my phone came with the earphones-cum-handsfree, PC-cable, PC software CD,and obviously the charger. Incidentally all of these connect to the same slot on the phone, which means you cant use the earphones while charging or when connected to the PC. However, the phone charges when connected to the PC, so no probs here. Miscellaneous accessories include the “tag” and extra sponges for the earphones.

Suddenly realized that hadn’t found the Guarantee/warrantee form. Immediately pinged Ashish and asked him about it (he had got his phone through the same offer as I did). He said he had got a booklet and a form which he mailed to them. Again dug into the box only to find an instruction book, a booklet which lists the authorized service centres, a kind-of quick-start guide and a 2-page “terms and conditions of guarantee”. But dint find any form. My friend at Moto tells me that from the IMEI number they can find out that this phone was from this particular offer. So for the time being I’m keeping this aside.

By this time I had started getting lotsa SMS’es. As expected, the phone is not very SMS-friendly. Typing is very un-intuitive compared to my 1100, both because of the keypad and because iTAP is used instead of T9. I now realized that my phone has a limit of only 10 messages (that compared with Nokia 3310/5!). Thought it might be something to do with phone memory/SIM memory or card memory; but after playing around with the options for a while, I gave up. I’l ask at the service center if its possible to upgrade the ROM or anything.

There were 2 pre-loaded games (both Java) – a car race and a cricket. Pretty decent I should say. But while playing these games I came across a horrible design layout blunder in the phone. Its like this: The GREEN button (to make or accept calls) is on the left and RED (power/disconnect/cancel) is on the right. But, in almost all applications, the button with OK semantics is assigned to the right soft key (above the RED button), and the BACK/CANCEL semantics is assigned to the left soft key (above the GREEN button). So u can imagine the consequences of pressing the RED button instead of OK button in some application (not to mention the confusion during usage.. like we normally associate one side of the phone with OK and the other side with CANCEL, but here everything’s everywhere).

Other observations are the finger smudges that appear all over the phone. But its not that big an issue. Volume buttons on the side, a camera button on the right side, and another programmable button on the left side are really handy. Speaker phone feature is pretty good too.

All said and done I really liked the phone. Had never expected it to be so good. I think I’l conclude with a summary of the adv-diasdv.

Advantages:

• LOOKS!!!
• Excellent screen display.
• Battery back-up.
• Very good mp3 sound quality, especially if using headphones.
• Pretty fast operation, like accessing the card memory etc.
• All those buttons on the sides.
• Some very useful tools and applications
• Its JAVA-enabled, so I can write my own applications.

Disadvantages:

• Everything related to SMS (number, typing etc).
• The design layout blunder I mentioned earlier.
• No infra-red (if u consider that as a disadv :D).
• Single slot for earphones, charger and PC-cable.