| Motorola EM326g slider phone
2009-11-20 20:09 UTC |
The latest slider phone from Motorola has some very good features, but it is a bit buggy and getting to some features is illogical.
The phone has a slide-out phone keypad. When closed there are six unprocted buttons. Two of which are soft buttons. The left soft button is menu on the home screen and the right one launches the browser. Between the three left buttons and the three right buttons is a ring for left-right-up-down and a single center button.
The buttons on the face and on the hidden keypad feel very cheap. It's a thick sticker on top of membrane buttons so be careful. You don't always know if a button has been pressed because you don't really hear or feel a click. Now, I don't expect the phone to fall apart during normal use. I just don't see that happening.
It has a surprising nice camera. 1.3 mega pixel. No zoom or focus. The length of the tiny camera is less than 1/4 of an inch. There's no video with this camera. Its also very slow, but for the price... You can choose to store photos on a micro SD card protected by the back cover inside. Max 2GB. The charger/data port is standard mini-USB. Just plug it in and you get a drive letter on your computer. You probably want to let the camera format the card first.
The whole camera just feels cheap.
The soft button for the browser cannot be disabled. Each time you press it, a minute is deducted.
There's two speakers. One is the ear piece. The other one is for the speaker-phone and to play music. The speaker is behind the circle directional button under a mesh.
Theres an mp3 player and FM radio built in. The mp3 player plays through the speaker or through the headphone jack. The FM radio only plays when there earphones are plugged in. The FM radio also plays through the speaker but only when earphones are plugged in and you have to choose from the Options menu. Note that the earphone jack cannot be plugged into an amplifier or your car stereo. Nothing line-level will work. There needs to be a load. I've never seen this behaviour. There is a work-around but its cumbersome. You would need a splitter. From the phone you would plug in a Y-splitter with one end to earphones and the other to your car stereo. The signal would be very weak of course.
I already found some bugs. When I looked at the call logs, I got an error. But after making and receiving some calls it finally shows calls missed, placed etc... Surprisingly there's no "all calls" log. Another bug I found is when I first switched the camera from the default VGA 640x480 to 1.3 MP, the camera would just idle. After I took the battery out and put it back in and turned on the phone and tried to access the camera, I got a camera saying its not ready. After a while I accidentally got it to work at 1.3MP.
Another oddity is that they put the phone ring volume and ring tone under Ring Styles. And to confuse things further there are profiles for loud, soft, vibrating, vibe and ring, and silent. Each profile has ring volume, ring tone, and settings for button tones and various other tones. So when you adjust the loudness using the two buttons on the side of the phone you may get a different ring tone and an unexpected loudness. For example, I had it on the "Loud" profile. I didn't realise that in the "Loud" profile I had the ring volume set low. So I set the volume to the max and when the phone rang, I didn't hear it. Luckly, when you set the phone to silent, it's silent.
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