The A780 has not yet been authorized by the FCC, but we were able to get our hands on one and use it for a while and photograph it and with it. Here is our review.
In summary, this is an outstanding phone – we give it a 9.5 out of 10.
The A780 is a 2.5G mobile phone with an extensive set of smartphone features.
The A780 uses the Linux distribution known as MontaVista Linux. The device offers PDA functionality, a 1.3 megapixel digital camera, a video player, an MP3 player, speakerphone, multimedia messaging, Internet access, and Bluetooth technology. It has Quad Band GSM capability, which means that you will be able to use it almost anywhere. 850 MHz and 1900 MHz are used mostly in the Americas, whereas 900 MHz and 1800 MHz are used elsewhere. The unit also offers EDGE high-speed data transfer. The following image shows the Edge feature in operation.
The LCD touchscreen is a QVGA 240×320 pixels with 65K colors. The 780 mAh Li-ion battery provides 6hours of talk time, and 190 hours of standby.
Included in the box are the usual rechargers, CD-ROMs, manuals (in Chinese), carrying case and headphones. In addition to the 48MB of main memory, the unit came with a SanDisk 128MB TransFlash Memory Card. The TransFlash cards are easily misplaced as they measure only 15x11x1 mm:
Bundled software includes a Document Viewer and Opera 7, a full HTML browser. The viewer, which is based on Picsel Technology’s ePage software, supports PDF files, as well as the usual Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Web browsing was a pleasure with the nice bright screen and Opera’s Small-Screen Rendering?, which eliminates the need for horizontal scrolling by reformatting the page to fit inside the screen width.
2 other nice useability features are predictive typing and voice dial. The A780 includes the iTAP predictive text input software, which halves the number of keystrokes by automatically comparing all of the possible letter combinations versus a built-in dictionary of words, in order to guess which word you intended to type. The phone also has speaker independent voice dial, which allows you to dial the phone by speaking either the number or name of a person from your phonebook.
The phone supports the POP3, IMAP4, SMTP E-mail protocols – although it lacks outgoing SMTP authentication configuration. On another note, we could not find the MOTOSYNC software that is supposed to make the A780 capable of securely synchronizing e-mail, calendar, and contacts over-the-air (OTA). Also, it would have been nice for Motorola to have included a Jabber client for the phone. Oh well, maybe some 3rd party Jabber co has something decent. On the plus side, the device includes Certicom’s movianVPN client for VPN functionality.
The A780′s PIM functions have a good design; they consist of an Alarm, Calendar, Calculator, To-Do list, Note Pad and World time. There’s also a nice Drawing Pad Editor for sketches. One puzzling thing was the presence of some private, password-protected pre-existing events in the Calendar.
The phone provides both video (in 3GP format) and voice/call recording and playback. Voice recording can be without notification. A still image from the A780 is shown below:
Developers, or those into DIY can now download the Motorola Software Development Kit (SDK) for the J2ME? platform from this Motocoder site. An A780 emulator has just been added to the SDK.
Although the A780 has some great features, there is always room for improvement. Things we’d like to see, include the following:
- The USB charger cable only seems to work when a computer is on the other end.
- The MotoSync software is not yet available.
- More software offerings e.g. Jabber.
- More granularity in the battery icon. The battery life can move from 100% to 50% in an instant.
- Support for both vibrate and ring at the same time.
- Ability switch to landscape from portrait.
- Infrared interface.
We believe that the Motorola A780 is the best business phone on the market today. As such, it will promote the Linux smartphone marketplace, and have an impact on Windows Mobile-based Smartphones.
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<strong>Motorola A780 Quickie Review</strong><br />
From my pals over at gadgetmaniac.com comes an insanely early first hand review of the Motorola A780.<br />
<br />
The A780 has not yet been authorized by the FCC, but we were able to get our hands on one…<br />
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Key features:<br />
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1.3 Megapixel camera<br />
QVGA 240×3…
Nice Review!
Phonescoop [http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=590] suggests that if you dig through FCC docs [gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/oet/cf/eas/reports/GenericSearchResult.cfm?RequestTimeout=500]<br />
it would seem to have been approved. [?]
http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=590 suggests that the phone has FCC approval <<with FCC links
I like the Nikon D70 in picture insert too.
do you have to flip-open the phone to answer or just answer straight without flippin? wat bout SMS? need to flip coz if yes then wat’s the keypad for?
Anything worth doing is worth doing too soon. Real obstacles don’t take you in circles. They can be overcome. Invented ones are like a maze.
The A780 is great. Bought one 4 days ago and I am amazed by its functionality. Its got what I always want ( or need? ) in a phone…a PDA function and the presence of a keypad for those quick SMS I need to send. The ITap software also greatly reduced the typing time for all literature I type, whether it be an SMS or a note which I will refer back to. The MP3 player, Opera, Viewer, Motorola mobile tools all works great. I now have all my important Excel and Powerpoint files in my phone and it greatly help me during quick meetings. I love this phone. Hopefully, there will be available after market applications which I can still install in my unit. The likes of a worksheet and TaskSpy of Symbian will help me a lot. One thing though is the battery life, which was somehow quick. But having an extra battery in the package took care of that problem a lot. Cheers to the guys in Motorola! Great work on this one!
sept 2,2005 <br />
i am using a motorola a780 but i find the processing time to browse the calendar schedules is too slow it usually take 20 seconds to check one day and another 20 sec to browse another date even if you want to enter a new appoitment in the calendar the processing is very slow comparing the features on the palm pda
i also wanted to get a english and complicated chinese dictionary which was a standard in my old motorola accompli a6188 can you recommend a program software on the dictionary
i have the A 780 and my carrier is cingular i live in california and i cant connect to the internet i called cingular got all the right specifications and everything but it keeps saying network problem what should i do?
Nice review ! I just bought this Moto PDA mobile fone a week ago. Just great. Though I am missing some NICE features as I used to have a Sony Ericsson K750i. Like the 2MP camera etc. Overall, I like this though as a replacement!