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Hardware
Unlike the rest of the internet which prefers ‘reviews’ of items based on their flash factor and the impression ‘journalists’ got of them by playing with them for a week, I am a bit old-fashioned and appreciate comments which stem from continues usage of things. And thus comes a second look at my Motorola Motofone F3 after having used it for a year.
Points that come to mind are:
- Unsurprisingly the phone didn’t gain any features in the year. It remains a very simple and limited device.
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I found the voice quality of phone calls good enough. In fact, it usually seemed better than on the phones of other people I used.
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Battery life started at a bit above a week when the phone was new and dropped a bit below a week after a while just to go back to a bit above a week recently. Those times are for use in Göttingen which probably means little to no excitement for the phone in terms of contacting new base stations. Something like a weekend trip to Berlin with a train ride and above-average usage of the phone didn’t really seem to make a difference to the battery life. Being in South Africa, with more moving around and – I suppose – weaker network coverage, drained the battery much more quickly, within four or five days, though.
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It’s annoying that the phone loses the date and time when the battery runs out or is removed.
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The loss of date and time is even more of a practical problem as dropping the phone on a hard floor usually means that it will open and the battery will come out.
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I never wrap the phone and just throw it in the backpack, yet it is essentially unscratched after a year of that. Pockets were shared with coins and keys as well to no detrimental effect.
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I am still not sure about what happens when the memory for received SMS messages (10) is full. The manual seems to claim the oldest message is deleted to make space for the newest one, but my impression is that an envelope symbol appears at the top of the screen and no new messages are received until you delete some of the old ones. Not that great, IMO, particularly as deleting a message is rather laborious unless you do it right after having read it.
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The first major annoyance with the device is its sluggishness. If the phone reacted to my keypresses a bit more promptly the experience would be significantly better.
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The second major annoyance is the keyboard. It’s feel is actually all right. But when pressing keys quickly – say when having to hit the ‘7’ key four times to ‘type’ an ‘S’ in a SMS – frequently one of the presses doesn’t register. I keep having the impression that this isn’t a hardware problem (the ‘feel’ of having pressed the key is OK) but rather another aspect of the software being sub-par and failing to keep up with my tremendous finger moving speed.
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Another slightly annoying quirkiness is what happens when you press and hold keys while entering things. Not only is this required to get a ‘+’ sign, but the original letter will appear when you press the key, the ‘cursor’ will move forward to the next position and then, after a second of holding or so, the character to the left of the cursor will change to the desired symbol. This still irritates me every single time as the advancing of the cursor always suggests to me that input has finished (and that I accidentally slipped off the key), and thus I’ll release the key too early, delete the wrong letter and try again. – Needlessly.
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The phone’s alarm is loud and works well.
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The phone’s ringing is too quiet and the vibrating is too weak. Not that I receive many calls but I miss a good percentage of them. Particularly as I prefer to use the vibrating only to avoid the chance of forgetting to turn the noise off. Even when having the phone in a pocket, I often don’t notice the vibration.
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The phone comes with a single socket for the charger. Apparently a headset can be used with it. Unfortunately that’s not a USB socket so the phone can’t be charged that way.
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A little plastic thing must have broken off inside the phone at some stage. This has no detrimental effects so far – except that shaking the phone now makes a little rattling noise.
In total I think the phone is holding up well. The interaction is tolerable but could be better in a few places, the durability seems quite amazing.
It may be interesting to add two more remarks. The first is that pretty much every single person who saw the phone really liked it at first sight. It’s simple, it’s sleek, it’s no-nonsense. Of course I enjoy pointing out the lack of features to them and some people turn out to be quite feature addicted once they hear that. But still, from the looks people are generally impressed.
And then there’s the obligatory iPhone comparison. As I pointed out the iPhone is not for me. The technology may be interesting but the toy is expensive, bound to break in my hands (as all other Apple products do), and I don’t actually need a mobile phone, so its price along with the hefty subscription fees completely rule it out: I computed my mobile telephony expenses and in the past year I spent around €50. That’s for the whole year, including the cost of the phone and calls in South Africa. With an iPhone people would have to spend that yearly total every month just for the phone contract. And they’d probably not use the phone at all in South Africa because they couldn’t just put in a local SIM card for €2 and would be submitted to the rip-off known as roaming fees instead.
In addition, with a cheap phone like that, I could just leave it in my bag at the beach while going for a swim. Even if it had been stolen it wouldn’t have been a big deal…
May 13, 2008, 1:12
Tagged as
hardware.
