Motorola E680

The Motorola E680 is an Excellent SMART Phone. (See Good and Bad Points).

Just bought a Motorola E680 recently to replace my SE-P800. Ever since using this phone for about a week, I have a better understanding of the idiosyncrasies of this phone.

Although a new user to the PDA/phone area may be impressed by the bells and whistles as compared to the usual 'dumb' phones, seasoned users of SmartPhones such as the O2, Treo and Sony Ericsson may find that this phone is still lagging behind its competitors.

Although I would have preferred to buy the SE-P910i, it costs more than S$1388 as opposed to S$838 for the E680. I do have a tinge of regret getting the E680 as the application is still not as refined as the SE or O2.

The interface for the SE is really user-friendly and intuitive as opposed to the E680.

Multimedia wise, the E680 can hold its own against the bigger boys. The built-in 3D speakers are probably the best as compared to the SE or O2 (its smaller sibbling, the E398 has a better resonance with surround effect).

One thing I like about the E680 is its ability to playback a myriad of formats ranging from MP3, MP4, RM, WAV, MIDI and 3GP. Frame rate is relatively decent if you encode your video properly.

The color screen is very clear and vibrant and the resolution is surprisingly better than the bigger SE900. However, the physical size of the screen has some disadvantages as the keyboard input is gonna be very challenging for the myopics. Furthermore, as mentioned in the summary of bad points, the input method or handwriting recognition still have a long way to go. It can only recognise one character at a time as compared to the competitors. Just hope that Motorola will have a firmware upgrade to address this issue.

If you intend to use this thing mainly as a PDA, you are gonna to be disappointed. But then again, you may also be disappointed if you intend to use this as a phone as the SMS features is still poor basically because of the immaturity of the text input method.

The other thing I dun like about this phone is that you cannot rotate or view the photo in full-size (scrollable is still acceptable). It will automatically fit to page and you cannot zoom in unless you click on EDIT. Another gripe is that you cannot select a few photos and delete the selected ones. Somehow, you can either delete one at a time or Delete All.

Hopefully, Motorola can come up with a firmware upgrade to address this issues just like SE did with the P800.

I've been using the Sony Ericsson P800 for over a year now and I've just bought the E680 to replace the P800.

CONS

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First impression of the phone was relatively good. However, after playing with it for an hour, it dawned upon me that the phone is not up to par with the SE series of PDA phones. The activation of certain menu on-screen is not intuitive as compared to the SE. You cannot change the icons on top of the menu for the Motorola, but you can do so on the SE.

Next the handwriting recognition is totally disappointing. When you use the SE, the text input is relatively easy and fast. However the E680's input is EXTREMELY SLOW.....I mean it !!

You have to key in one character at the time and the recognition is not as accurate as the SE. I have very neat and straight handwriting and lots of people have commented highly on it. With the Motorola E680, I've completely given up hope on trying to write with the hardwriting input.

Trying to SMS using this phone also poses a lot of problems as you need to use two hands to do it. You cannot use the actual keypad found on the SE800, 900 or 910i to SMS as the E680 doesn't have a keypad. Considering the price I paid for the phone, I would actually expect a full-fledge Opera-type browser, but what we are given is only a WAP browser which is completely useless as you cannot use it to browse the other websites.

PROS

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The only good thing I can say about the E680 is that the package is smaller than the SE series and this makes it very easy to carry about.

I like the ability to read MP4, MP3 and Realmedia format files.

Apart from that, I think I'll send my SE-P800 for repairs rather than to struggle with the E680's interface.