Posts Tagged ‘Motorola’

Battery stay at low level even after charging overnight?

There are some phones with higher current need, for example iPhone 3G and 3Gs, HTC Hero and Magic, Google Nexus One, HTC HD2, Samsung Omnia i8910, and Motorola Milestone.

Sometimes you are might just be able to charge to around 50% – 60% of full battery, chances are you are using a USB hub or a bad AC adpator.  If so, you might need to use the original AC adaptor.  The rational behind this is that it cannot charge fully if the input ampere is lower than the requirement of the phone.  This way the electricity cannot be flowed to the phone and thus the phone cannot be charged.

Next time when you buy an AC adaptor with USB out, remember to check the output of the phone – a 500mA adaptor is unlikely to fully charge a phone which requires 1A input(1A=1000mA).

Motorola Endeavor HX1 Review.

A Google search for “HX1″ will normally only get you a “Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1″ review, which barely helps.

Recently, we have acquired a Motorola HX1 bluetooth headset. We don’t do unboxing, as there should be a plentiful of them on Youtube. We did, however, take a couple of photos of our very headset.

Price
We got this piece of small headset in Hong Kong at HK$1280 (€110), it was easily the most expensive bluetooth device we’ve bought – we could have gotten the Jawbone Prime thing below this. We picked the Motorla “?” Endeavor HX1. It’s the second product with a Chinese model name – the previous one was the A1200 “?” Linux based phone.^

Setting up
I couldn’t wait to unpack the phone in office, I dismounted the packaging on metro. Setting up a connection is amazingly easy and user-friendly – as I wore the headset and turn it on, it has internal voice instruction in English to help me pair up the machine with my HTC Diamond. It took me no time to finish the whole pairing thing. Note that I didn’t even need to read the manual.

Voice Quality
I tried to make a call when I was in an East Rail Train, the railway notorious to every Hong Kong citizen as each compartment of the train is equipped with five televisions which keep spamming ads very loudly, damaging the ears of the passengers. My friend took my call and found that my background voice is acceptable and my voice was able to be heard quite clearly. Then I tried to activate the stealth mode with a single press on a button which I suspected to be the stealth button, and poof! I heard “Stealth Mode On”, while my background noice was vanished, as reported by my friend.

My friend was astonished and could not believe that I was on the loudest train on the world. He commented my voice was a little bit “stacked” though. (After reading manual, it does say the voice will be a bit distorted when the stealth mode is on)

Further tests involving talking in front of a loudspeaker was equally impressive for the recepient (although you might be unable to hear them because of your own noisy environment)

Comfortability
Despite that the package was bundled with two sets of clips and earplugs of various sizes, we found it quite a challenge to obtain the best result. Both the two earplugs will make the ear painful after using for an hour or two. Besides, it would need experience to calibrate the HX1 for the other side of phone to hear clearly. A misplacement inside the ear canal could result in hearing hasard on the other side of phone.

Overall comment
Despite being dissatisfied by the awfully designed phones, Motorola impressed us this time with the preipheral. If you need to work or stay in a noisy place for long time, this HX1 will be your choice (providing your budget allows – the price seems to be vary greatly among different countries, as we heard the retail price in mainland China for HX1 is double that than in Hong Kong). Normal users can buy a headset paying a less prohibitive price.

Caution when buying
Interested users have to notice that the headset’s voice instruction has different languages but should be not changeable. So if you buy in mainland China, you get Mandarin voice instruction, if you buy in Hong Kong, you get English.

^ Side note: ? means bright, ? means clear, but ?? is the Ching Ming festival, the grave-sweeping festival (wiki here))

Motorola “Motosurf” A3100 touch WM6.1 phone

Yet another full screen WM6.1 (Windows Mobile 6.1) touch phone. Boring. Wait, it’s Motorola, and it’s 3.5G WCDMA? By merely looking at the outlook, you will immediately realise it’s not the crappy Q9 monstrosity.

We have sources that it is confirmed that Motosurf A3100 will be available on January 2009. Following the footsteps of HTC and friends, Sony Xperia X1, and Nokia 5800 XpressMusic etc, Motorola, unfortunately, falls amongst the slowest manufacturer to launch a full screen touch phone.

Let’s have a look on its specifications.

(Click to enlarge)

A big boo for no crystal talk feature. However this feature caught our attention:

1 – Up to 6.8 hours of talk time – A WM phone cannot achieve that easily. Bravo if it’s real.

2 – Oh, “Connect with friends and update your status with one-touch access to Facebook”. Nice function the social butterflies (We will compare it with same program on Xperia and iPhone once we get the A3100.)

Other than these two functions, nothing too special. We expect it will be around US$550 or HK$4,380. Don’t buy it above that price. Seriously.

The screen size is 2.8 inch, the same as HTC Touch Diamond, but it’s the edge of A3100 that gives the impression that the screen is smaller.

We believe that there are lots of choices for similar specification as Motosurf A3100. It is recommended that you try as much possibilities as possible before deciding to buy which one. Youtube is your friend.