The phone to get for techie features (Motorola Time Port P7389)

Member Name: andyroo

Product:	Motorola Time Port P7389
Date:	27/06/01 (430 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: tri band, built in modem, infra red

Disadvantages: not that pretty

Motorola's Timeport P7389 is not an ugly phone, but at the same time not the prettiest flower in the garden. In fact if it were describing itself in a lonely hearts column hoping for a hot date with a flirtatious Nokia, it would perhaps be pushing it's luck to quote "Average looks".

To be fair though, the Timeport is bursting with features that belie it's simpleton styling. It has been on the market for about 18 months now and as other manufacturers have launched new models the P7389 has got cheaper and cheaper - you can now get them free on certain contracts.

The Timeport is a tri-band phone which means it can work with different networks that use different radio frequencies. You may not make use of this feature, but it helps with roaming, especially if you take your phone to North America where they use different frequencies to ours.

The phone has a built-in WAP browser which allows you to access WAP services. The screen is fairly large and will display graphics that fit within the WAP standard - for instance it will handle all the graphics elements of waphq.com.

The setup of the WAP settings is reasonably easy which is fortunate, since once you discover the restrictions imposed by using your mobile phone company's own wap portal, you will soon want to break out and use an independent one such as Totalise! (www.totalise.net)

Motorola have built-in Voice Activated Dialing to the Timeport. There were complaints when the phone was originally released that the voice recognition was poor. However there has been an upgrade to the software recently and I have had no such problems - it gets the right person about 95% of the time, which allowing for factors such as background noise, I think is a reasonable rate of success. The Timeport avoids the embarrassment of calling the wrong number by playing back it's voice record before dialling. For instance, if you had a "Laura" and a "
Lauren" in your phonebook you would expect the phone to maybe have a bit of trouble with the voice recognition. You press the voice button, say "Lauren" and the phone plays back it's original recording of you saying "Lauren" before dialling - thus you know that the voice activated dialling has selected the correct record.

One feature that has not been mentioned in other reviews on Ciao is the most important feature to me. The Timeport P7389 has a built-in modem and a built-in IR port. Considering that the infra-red and modem attachment for the Ericsson T10, T20 and T28 is about £80 having this built in to an altogether neater package is a real boon.

Motorola have given the infra red modem a set of strange protocols which originally made compatibility with PDAs a bit of an issue - ie. it didn't work! However the likes of Psion soon released a patch and now I can browse the internet on my Psion Mx5 and send email from anywhere - which is a feature that's worth it's weight in gold as far as I'm concerned.

SMS: Timeports have a Tap (normal mode) and an intelligent (predictive) tap mode. I think the predictive system on the Motorola, although it takes a little getting used to, is much more advanced than that offered by Nokia - requiring fewer keypresses.

The charger supplied with Timeport also comes with European socket adaptors, so the system travels well.

The only feature it's missing is a keypad lock. The buttons are much more difficult to knock than the bubble switches used on Nokias but it is still possible to set the phone off in your pocket. I'd therefore advise getting a case for the phone if you want to avoid calling your friends from your pocket or handbag.

At 108 grams the Timeport P789 is not the lightest of phones but it is lighter than, say, the Ericsson T10. If you have a PDA with infra red such as the excellent Psion Mx5, I would really recomme
nd this phone as an economical mobile internet and email option - which will give extra value to your PDA ownership by opening up a whole load of new possibilities, enabling you to get more out of your PDA.

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