The heavily multimedia-oriented Motorola E680, the company's first Linux-based mobile phone available outside the Far East, has received a mixed review at howardchui.com. The reviewer generously praises the E680's man-machine interface in all of its many aspects but pans its RF performance and quibbles about a number of minutiae.

The E680, which incorporates a MontaVista embedded Linux OS and the Trolltech Qt/Embedded graphical environment, “really shines” as a portable video player, according to the reviewer, with a 2.5-inch, 320 x 240-pixel color display that's “very bright and easy on the eyes” and which “most people perceive . . . to be bigger than it actually is.”

As far as audio is concerned, the phone also shines. “Just how loud are the e680's speakers?” the reviewer rhetorically asks. They are “loud enough that you would have to raise your voice in order for other people to hear you over it. Here's a neat trick, since the speakers are located on the back of the e680, try putting the phone on a solid surface like a table. The table will bounce the sound back, making the e680 sound even louder. Cool stuff.”

The Motorola e680 also provides decent photographic quality, according to the reviewer, though he laments that its integrated camera has only VGA resolution, and he grants it a very capable speakerphone, adequate gaming capabilities, “extensive” voice recognition features, a “really cool” looking navigation pad, and an application launcher that “takes a while to get used to but works quite well.”

The reviewer finds himself “a little disappointed about the lack of quad band GSM support which lately has become quite common on Motorola phones.” And while the Chinese character recognition is excellent, he complains that the English text recognition is slow but very accurate. The battery and signal meters are not, moreover, “visible in most applications.”

Read the full review at howardchui.com.

 
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