There she Goes!! (Motorola V600)

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Product:	Motorola V600
Date:	22/03/04 (1748 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great display, great Bluetooth, new iTap

Disadvantages: Slow, no IR, a bit heavy, 30 day trial software

We were thrilled when we first heard that Motorola was going to build the V600. Up until that point, the high-end Bluetooth handset market was dominated by Sony Ericsson. Nokia certainly had a few models out with Bluetooth, but they all had enough troubles to often rule them out for a real Bluetooth fan. So when I was told last August that Motorola would be sending me a review unit, I could hardly wait.

Yet wait is what I did. For months. Seemingly Motorola hadn't planned on the popularity of the new series of phones (which includes the less expensive V300 and V500), and that they were running low on parts. Particularly the parts for the camera.

So I waited. For months. And here we are over 6 months later, and Motorola is still having major problems getting the V600 to market. Luckily, I didn't have to rely on Motorola for the review unit, and instead was able to get one of the limited edition Aston Martin V600 handsets courtesy of my friends at ACS. Only 1000 of these babies are being made, and most are going to Aston Martin owners. They are also priced for the person that can afford such cars, going for well over $1,500 as of the time of this writing.

For those curious, the Aston Martin edition V600 comes in a nice aluminum box with a wood inlay top, and includes the HS810 Bluetooth headset. Additionally, there are Aston Martin logos on the inside and outside of the device, and it is packed with cool Aston Martin ringtones, screen savers, and pictures.

Sizing it up

While physically it is relatively compact (88mm x 47mm x 23mm), especially when compared to a Sony Ericsson Z600, the V600 is not exactly a lightweight handset. Our test unit came in at 127g, about 15g heavier than the Sony Ericsson. Some people will be bothered by the external stub antenna, too. I am not one of them. I don't think that the antenna adds that much bulk to the handset, and the fact that the V600 is a Quadband GSM device more than ma
kes up for it.

The rest of the exterior of the V600 is quite nice. The front and rear covers are metal with a satin finish that seems pretty scratch resistant. There are tasteful chrome accents, and a highly polished bezel that covers the small 96x32 monochrome sub-display and the digital camera.

In terms of external controls, we have the up/down volume rocker on the left side of the handset. Directly below the volume control is the smart-key, a multi-purpose key that generally acts as the right softkey. It can also be used as the camera shutter when the V600 is closed. The volume and smart-key can be used together to switch ringer profiles, too. On the right side of the handset we have the voice command key, used for accessing voice dialing tags and voice menu shortcuts.

The top of the V600 has a small loop for a lanyard, for those that prefer wearing their handsets, and a 2.5mm jack for wired headsets. I like the fact that even though the V600 supports Bluetooth, Motorola though enough to leave the ability to use a wired headset. The bottom of the handset has the same connector as most current Motorola devices. The back of the V600 has a small grill for the external speaker (used for ringtones and the speakerphone function)

When opened, the V600 reveals a very attractive keypad and display. The main keypad has a nice gloss finish to it that is quite good looking, like the rest of the handset. Many people will not like the fact that there is no space between the keys, such as with the Siemens S55. I don't really find this to be a problem since the keys themselves are quite large. What I do find to be a problem is the V600 missing one of my key presses, or double pressing when I only wanted a single press. This didn't happen an awful lot, but it happened enough for me to notice.

I had a similar problems from time to time with the other buttons at the top of the keypad, like the two softkeys. Between the two softke
ys is the menu key, used for accessing the main menu from standby mode or for accessing submenus when elsewhere in the system. Directly below the menu key is the directional-pad, one of the better ones I have used. It is responsive, easy to control, and has a center button that won't get accidentally triggered. On either side of the d-pad controller we have the two call control buttons, used for initiating and ending a call.

Multimedia

On the top half of the opened V600, of course, you will find the display. The display that Motorola chose for its new flagship is a real winner. It is a 65k color TFT transflective unit, meaning that the colors are bright and clear, and that the display works well even in direct sunlight. People will surely complain that it could be larger, but I would argue that for its 176x220 resolution, it is quite large enough and doesn't add undue bulk to the overall design.

Since the camera was supposedly one of the main reasons for all of the long months of delays the V600 has incurred, it is probably worth talking about it next. The camera is located on the exterior of the top half of the clamshell, as we mentioned earlier. It is of VGA resolution (640x480), and is located next to a self-portrait mirror, but does not have the support of a flash or assist light. While the color balance and saturation of the photos it takes is quite good, the sharpness is not. The images look quite fuzzy, almost as if they were created through interpolation or digital zoom from a smaller image size. Speaking of digital zoom, the V600 has a 4x digital zoom system, and also has the ability to scale down images to the screen size and re-save them so that they take up less room.

Unfortunately there is no real easy way to get the images off of the phone, short of sending them in a MMS or email. There is no IR port on the V600, and even Bluetooth can not be used to send an image to another phone. The Mobile PhoneTools softw
are that comes with the V600 is only a 30 day demo, so you won't be able to rely on that for long to download your photos. If you have a decent Bluetooth adapter on your PC, you should be able to use that to browse through the V600's file system and access the photos that way, though.

[It should be noted that originally I stated that there was no way to send ringtones or photos from the phone. I have been told by many people that this is incorrect, but I no longer have the handset to verify this myself. While I can't imagine I would have missed this, the people have spoken. -editor]

Another thing missing that is camera-related is video capture. The V600 is only capable of playing back downloaded video clips, not recording them. This is a shame since there would be plenty of room for storing captured clips in the V600's 5MB of internal RAM. One thing that did live up to expectations was the 24 voice polyphonic sound system. The ringtones, especially the cool motor-revving Aston Martin ones, were pretty cool. There was a good assortment of generally loud and noticeable utility ringtones, too. Sirens, alarms, etc.

User Interface

The V600's UI will be familiar to anybody who has used a Motorola phone in the past couple of years. It is similar to that found in the T720, for example, but quite a bit more refined. But before I get to the good parts, let me deal with the bad. The UI is too slow. It seems that either the code needs to be streamlined, or that the V600 just needs more motor under the hood. It simply is not possible to quickly scroll through a list of items on the screen, such as contacts or emails. I hope that this can be fixed in future firmware revisions, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

So with that out of the way, the good stuff. Overall, I like the UI quite a lot. It might sometimes be a bit hard to find the settings you are looking for when first getting familiar with the V600, but the lo
ok and feel of the UI is very consistent and makes good sense. For starters, the main menu can be shown as either a list or a grid of icons. In both cases they can be reordered to your liking, which is nice. And while you can't skip to a main menu item by pressing the corresponding keypad button, you can program those keypad buttons to do that if you like. Otherwise you can program the buttons to go right to particular functions deeper in the menu structure that you frequently access. To do that you simply highlight the menu item on the display, and hold the menu button down for a couple of seconds. You will then be prompted to create a shortcut, which can be either a keypad shortcut, as we discussed, a voice tag shortcut, or both. This is really handy. On top of that, you can program the 4 directions of the d-pad controller to go to where you want, for even faster access.

Another nice thing with the UI is that it is consistent. The right softkey (or the smart-key on the left side of the device) is always the select button. The center button on the d-pad also acts as a select button, which is the only logical use of the button. It is not wasted on calling the web browser, as is the case on so many Samsung phones. The left soft-key is back, exit, or cancel - which makes sense. Whenever you see the menu key icon above the menu key on the display, it means that you can bring up additional options with the menu key. Everything makes sense.

Last up are the themes. My V600 came with 6 themes pre-installed. There does not seem to be a way to add more, or to edit the existing themes. I don't know if this is because of the Aston Martin themes that come with this version of the V600 or not, but I suspect there is no way to add or edit themes on the regular V600, either.

A phone is a phone is a phone

At the start of this story when I was discussing the external appearance of the V600 I said that I didn't mind the antenna, that
I thought it was worth it. The reason for that is the V600's performance as a regular phone. Not only does it support all 4 GSM bands in widespread use in the world, but it seems to do it quite well. The V600's reception abilities on our local 1900Mhz band were on par with those of the recent Nokia devices I have tested, which is great. The more bands a phone supports, the harder it is to design a good antenna that works well. That's why I think the stub antenna is well worth having in this case.

Audio quality also seemed quite good to me. Everything sounded clear, and loud enough. Even when used with headsets, Bluetooth or otherwise, the audio quality was very good. The built-in speakerphone also worked pretty well. I think it is a bit strange that the speaker is located on the back of the device, and the microphone on the inside. This means that unless you sit the device on its side, opened, either the speaker will be facing the table top or the microphone will be facing away from you. Overall the speakerphone worked well, though, and was loud and clear enough to be usable.

The profiles system was a little less impressive, though. While still quite workable, the lack of being able to change every aspect of the pre-defined profiles (or "styles", as Mot calls them) was a bit of a hinderance. For example, when you select the "vibe" style, you can only change the type of vibration pattern that is used. I would rather full control over the profiles. But considering that there are 5 pre-defined profiles that cover a decent range of situations (Loud, Soft, Silent, Vibe, Vibe & Ring), it really isn't all that bad. Just a wee bit restrictive. One nice thing is that you can quickly switch styles by using the volume keys. Lower the ring volume to 1, and then hit the down volume button again to switch to Vibe, down again to go totally silent. Raise the volume to go back to the Loud profile.

The contact system in t
he V600 is weird, as with all Motorola handsets. It is hard to tell if there are really multiple numbers/address in a single contact, or just a series of separate contacts that all share the same name. When you are viewing a contact you can only ever see one piece of information (name or address) at a time. If you wish to see another number, you need to press up or down. This makes it feel like separate contacts to me. The fact that a voice dial tag is assigned to a particular number, not to a person as in Sony Ericsson handsets, furthers this thought. Yet in spite of that, it all works well enough, if a bit slow. As I mentioned in the UI section, navigating through lists quickly is simply not possible. You will need to use the keypad to skip ahead in order to find a number with any speed. It is also worth noting that there appears to be no way to send a contact to another phone via SMS, Bluetooth, or otherwise. I find that a bit strange.

I mentioned the use of voice dial tags a moment ago. The system seems to work pretty well from a voice recognition point of view. I find being forced to use separate tags for "Jeff Mobile", "Jeff Home", and "Jeff Office" to be quite annoying, though. In these cases I think it would be easier to just assign the most commonly dialed numbers to the keypad, instead. That way they can be dialed just by long pressing the appropriate keypad digit. But if you are going to be dialing from a headset, Bluetooth or otherwise, you are going to want to use the voice tags.

Last up in this section is the battery. The V600's battery seemed to last decently long considering my frequent Bluetooth usage. I would imagine that it could get close to Motorola's claim of a week of standby time if the Bluetooth system were off, and I wasn't sitting here playing with it constantly. The claimed 6.5 hours of talk time seems a bit more suspect to me, though.

Look ma, no wires

As you m
ight have guessed, the big draw for me to the V600 was Bluetooth. I use Bluetooth all the time. I use Bluetooth headsets, I sync my phones with my PC, I use Bluetooth to connect from my PDA to the phone for GPRS data when I am on the road. Basically, I live off of Bluetooth. That is why I am so pleased to say that the V600's Bluetooth system is top notch. I have not run into a single compatibility problem with either PC, PDA, or headset. The signal strength seems to be quite strong, and the minimal amount of configuration offered is intuitive.

From a headset perspective, I tested the V600 with the Motorola HS810 headset, and the Sony Ericsson HBH-65 and HBH-30 headsets. The audio quality was clear, the connections held up with moderate distances and obstacles quite well, too. Overall I was very pleasantly surprised. Both the Headset and Hands Free profiles are supported. No muss, no fuss.


Using the V600 with a PDA can be a bit more complicated, though. For one, you need to put the phone into discoverable mode, just like you do with a Sony Ericsson T68i. This will be of interest to you if you have suffered the annoyances of Bluejackers in the past. People can't send you a contact if they can't see your device, after all. Setting up the connection from my PalmOS device (a Sony Clie UX50) was a bit complicated, as I could not use the V600 as a normal modem connection. Instead, I had to set up the V600 as a "Local Network" connection and then use a script to do the GPRS APN designation and dial the normal GPRS access number. That took some digging on the net to find, but once I did it was smooth sailing. I didn't have time to try the V600 with a PocketPC device, though, so your milage may vary.

As mentioned earlier in the story, there is no way to send a photo or contact from the V600 to another device by using Bluetooth (or any other means). The reverse is not true, however. I was able to receive photos and such
from various other Bluetooth devices without problem. One thing that I did miss in the Bluetooth system, though, was the Synchronization profile. I like the fact that my PC (Linksys Adapter) and my Sony Ericsson Z600 can sync directly with each other, without the need of third party software. This would be particularly nice since the desktop software that comes with the V600 (which includes synchronization) is only a 30 day trial.


Speaking of that software, it is kind of a mixed bag. The initial setup was very nice. It used my Bluetooth adapter to search for the phone, pair with it, and create the connections needed to use it as a GPRS modem and to use it with the PhoneTool software. Now I just run the software and it automatically connects to the V600, unlike the software supplied with Sony Ericsson handsets. Once connected you can either copy over contacts to/from Outlook and the V600, or synchronize them. I recommend the copy method, as the sync seemed confused by the various phone numbers for a single contact in Outlook (it kept prompting for number type). Additionally, it always seems to mix the SIM and main memory contacts of the phone together. I certainly don't want the SIM numbers in my outlook, especially since most all of them are duplicates of the regular numbers that I keep for one I need to put the SIM into a phone that is not mine. The system just doesn't work all that well for sync, so I would just stick with the copy function.

The other features of the software work well. The phone browser is very nice and makes it easy to fetch photos or ringtones from the phone. There is support for creating SMS or email messages on the PC, too. You can also connect to the Internet with the phone's GPRS system using this application. It worked well.

If you are using the GPRS system just from the phone, you might find it a bit complicated to setup. But once you figure out that you have to define a "Web Session"
in order to use GPRS, you are fine. The GPRS system worked well, and seemed relatively speedy. No real complaints.

As mentioned earlier, there is no IR port on the V600. I find that odd. You can use a cable, though. The V600 is compatible with the same cable used on the T720 series.

iTap or T9?

It has been interesting to watch the development of Motorola's predictive text system over the years. iTap, as it is known, has never really been a contender when compared to Tegic's T9 system. T9 is almost universally used by all of the manufacturers except Motorola. But with the current version of iTap, Motorola has gotten very close to not only offering a system that is "as good as", but very close to offering one that is better than T9.


Our V600 included iTap support for English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Turkish, and PortugueseOne of the best new features of the current iTap system is word completion. When you are entering a word, just as you would with T9, iTap will try to complete the word for you by showing the suggestion as gray letters after the cursor. If you see the word you want, you just hit up on the d-pad to accept the word and move on to entering in the next word. This is a great idea, truly. Imagine my delight when I was configuring the email client and had to enter in the POP server's name and saw it pop up as a suggested word because I had entered it once already as the SMTP server. That saved me a lot of effort, and I really appreciated it. But the system is good for regular messages, too, if not quite as useful all the time. You can also define your preferred primary and secondary input methods. In my case, I like that I can define iTap English as primary and iTap German as secondary, and quickly switch between them.

But iTap has its faults. For one, pressing the 1 button defaults to putting the number 1 in the word instead of putting a period. If you enter a space af
ter the word, the 1 key will default to a period, but not if you are at the end of a word. This is real annoying, as you either have to waste a character at the end of each sentence, or you need to waste a keystroke to select the period instead of the 1. What were they thinking? The other problem is the input speed. As I mentioned in the UI section, the V600 is a bit sluggish in general. Fast texters will be disappointed.


The rest of the message system is pretty standard. SMS is simple, and includes no templates or profiles. MMS allows inserting of ringtones and pictures and such, supports templates, but does not allow you to create multiple slides within a message. The email client worked pretty well, and dealt with attachments nicely, but was lacking configuration options for things like downloading only headers, though it does allow for a maximum message size. A few different font options would have been appreciated, as well.

Apps and Games

The V600 comes with a few less applications than most high-end handsets these days. For example, there is no Task/ToDo list, no stopwatch or countdown timer, either. But the applications it does come with are quite nice. The Calendar, for example, is very pretty and very easy to use. Navigation is a piece of cake, and there are plenty of options for appointments - including multi-day durations and auto-repeat. I did find it odd, though, that there seemed to be no way to cancel a new appointment once you started entering in data for it. I had to resort to using the red end-call button to get all of the way out of the system. But otherwise it was quite nice.

The calculator application was also nice. Very nice, actually. It made very good use of the d-pad controller and was very intuitive. I think it is probably the best calculator I have used on a mobile phone. The alarm clocked worked well, too, and allows for multiple alarms to be defined.

SMS Chat/IM support is also included,
but I can't really understand why anybody would pay to use this with SMS messages costing what they do. The two included games were Stuntman and Supreme Snowboarding. Stuntman puts you as a budding stuntman trying to land a job in a movie. You must drive your car through a series of movie sets, avoiding death, all the while doing what the director wants. Supreme Snowboarding is a fairly straightforward boarding game, and it was fun to play.

The Verdict

what can I say? The V600 was worth the wait. It does just about everything well, or really well. There are not many handsets that can make that claim. It does have its Achilles Heel, though, and that is the menu and text input speed. It is annoyingly slow at times, which is a shame because it tarnishes an otherwise very impressive handset.

I still find it to be quite usable, but I know many of you will not, which is a shame. If you live on the speedier side of the world, you might want to consider a Sony Ericsson Z600 or, if you want something smaller, a Panasonic X70. But for me, I think I would prefer the V600 to both of those.


Thank You for reading this review. prodigy_techus

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