Smart 3G handset sets the pace
Product: Motorola A1000 Price: To be announced Pros: Powerful, compact Cons: Notyet available
The current crop of 3G handsets has come in for a lot of criticism. Many users complain that the phones offer too few features for their excessive size. But that will change before long. Among the next-generation handsets from Motorola is the feature-packed A1000.
Trivia junkies will remember the A1000 was also the name of Commodore's original Amiga desktop computer, which also ran on a Motorola processor. However, while the Amiga ran on a seven-megahertz processor and 256 kilobytes of memory (expandable to 8MB), this phone gives a massive 24MB, expandable to whatever your SD card offers.
More importantly, the A1000 beats current 3G handsets in looks and functionality. The handset supports Wideband CDMA and triband GSM for roaming, with Bluetooth and global positioning system support.
Beating current 3G cameras, the A1000 has a 1.2-megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom and support for two-way video-conferencing and mpeg 4 video. The large display supports 65,000 colours at 208x320 pixels. The fact that it is a touch screen will enable Motorola's designers to do away with keys entirely, which suits me.
The phone can also create or play back Windows video and audio and MP3, and features two speakers - though it will be hard to judge the unit's stereo quality without switching to headphones.
The phone runs on the Symbian operating system and Java 2 Mobile Edition, and includes the Picsel Document Viewer to access Microsoft Office files, Adobe PDFs and zip files. The software supports multitasking, so it should be possible to surf websites while listening to music or making a phone call. The browser supports small-screen rendering, so users should not be restricted to their telecom operator's Wap sites.
The A1000 is not due to be released until the fourth quarter, so potential 3G subscribers have another reason not to sign up for a few more months.
