Design and Looks
Many would agree that the Motorola Motoming A1600 looks similar to its predecessor, the A1200. While this is correct, the phone's few design changes make a sea of a difference in the impact the phone makes to the visual senses. One of the things that the A1600 inherits from the A1200 is the translucent hard plastic flap. Such designs are unique on phones, making the Motoming look like a clamshell while still maintaining a distinct PDA-bar form factor. On the hard flap is a low-centrally placed loudspeaker with the Motorola logo embossed on top of it. The copper leads into the speaker are almost invisible as they are beautifully hidden along the thin aesthetic lines.
Opening the flap reveals the PDA in its full glory. The phone is drop dead sexy and it obliterates the axiom which claims PDA phones have to be official and stiff-looking. The screen is only 2.4” diagonally but because of the phone's compact form, it looks pretty big. Since it's of the resistive stylus-operable variety, the size is reasonable and shouldn't bother most users. The screen is sharp and is also sensitive enough to afford thumb operation which is always welcome.
Below the screen is a centrally located navigation joystick with call and end keys on either side. It must be noted that most PDAs don't have nav pads or joysticks to go with them. But one cannot really dismiss their utility even on touchscreen phones. The back of the phone is soft-touch plastic coated with rubber to make gripping easy and also to enhance the phone's aesthetic. So, between the pseudo clam-shell-cum-PDA design and the odd-yet-welcome joystick pad, we can safely say the Motoming is a design success and the best looking PDA till date- hands down.
The phone's OS is the same Linux-based one that we've been seeing since the Motorokr E6 but this time the phone incorporates what Motorola calls a Simple User Interface or SUI. It features handwriting recognition and virtual QWERTY and alphanumeric keypads in addition to voice recognition support. The UI is loaded with many widgets like Yatra, NDTV New, Google Search, MotoNav navigation, dictionary with enunciation of sounds in the native language and the unique but flawed Business Card Reader.
As the name suggests, the Business Card Reader or BCR takes snapshots of business cards and pulls out info from the cards using character recognition software. The information is then stored into the user's contacts database. In practice it fails to recognize characters and translates what is otherwise perfectly legible contact detail into utter gibberish. Sometimes, the info is placed in wrong fields.
The phone's USP is the GPS with A-GPS support and free life-time navigation. This is because it is not dependent on the mobile service provider. The GPS uses Motorola's MotoNav navigation software and the maps are provided by mapmyindia which are preinstalled in the 1GB complimentary card that ships with the phone. The maps cover over 30 major cities and points of interest like hotels, national and state highways. Navigation is available in three modes including short, fast and pedestrian. There is also voice-guided navigation and A-GPS functionality. Users can also share their current GPS location via SMS or MMS.
The phone's snapper is a 3.15MP unit with autofocus but without any sort of flash. Pictures are decent but by no means the best in this range. There are few camera setting options and also a photo editor on board but we doubt most users will even open that application on account of the sub-standard photos. Video recording fares better but the phone is still no Samsung Omnia HD.
What's working against the phone (and this is based on its feature set that doesn't quite reflect the price) is that there is no Wi-Fi or 3G connectivity. While 3G is still very expensive in India, the exclusion is forgivable but it would have been better if Wi-Fi was included. The phone is worth considering only because of the free GPS support. Other things working against the phone is a poor 930mAh battery and the lack of a secondary camera for video calls.
Features
- Unique clamshell-cum-PDA bar form factor
- 2.4” 256K colour TFT resistive screen with handwriting recognition support
- D-pad with joystick
- GPS with A-GPS and free lifetime navigation support
- 3.15MP camera with autofocus
- Speech recognition software
Accessories
- Motorola S605-CH1780A
- Motopure H12 Universal Bluetooth Headset-80189
- Motorokr S9-80204
