Motorola MOTOROKR E6

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Motorola MOTOROKR E6

Frazier Barretto, May 04, 2007 1900 hrs IST

Here's Motorola's newest PDA. Yes, for those hibernating: Its not a slider! Read more to find out how hard this rocks!

Linux OS, Touchscreen, 2 MP camera, Slim & Elegant, External Media Controls, Standard Headphone Jack, Stereo Bluetooth, FM Tuner.

Slow Interface, Few Customizations, Music Player, No Widescreen Mode, Expensive (Premium).

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Interface

The MOTOROKR runs on the Linux OS. It is a tweaked version of the same OS seen on the Motorola's Ming. The Linux OS seems more optimized compared to Ming, though it still lags behind when compared to phones operating on Symbian or Windows Mobile. Scrolling through menus you will easily notice the lag. The interface as I mentioned earlier is similar to that of Ming. There is a line of most used shortcuts placed at the top on the screen and towards the bottom there is another line of shortcuts. The top line has four shortcuts: Main Menu, Contacts, Messages, and Number keypad. The number keypad negates the missing keypad to quite an extent making dialing numbers pretty easy. An Alert shortcut appears in the form of an exclamation in the top line of shortcuts whenever youmiss a call, receive a message etc. The top line of shortcuts can't be customized at all. The lower line of shortcuts has Ringstyles, Real Player, Video Camera, and another two shortcuts. Only the last two shortcuts can be customized. Even that customization is limited to only a list of 27 shortcuts offered. You can't add your own shortcuts to the list. The customization is available under Settings->Home Screen Setup. The one key below the Hang-Up button can be customized to the same 27 available shortcuts.

The phone has 8 MB at its disposal for smooth OS functioning. The problem is that this same memory is shared between the OS and the phone. That puts a lot of load on the OS to manage. There was a 1 GB microSD card that was bundled along with an SD adaptor. The phone accepts SD cards and is capable of working easily with one that of 2 GB capacity. The Task Manager is accessed from the Main Menu, which took me some time to figure out; as usual Motorola tends to make some options quite puzzling.

There is a good number of software bundled along. The most impressive was the Business Card Reader (BCR). With this program the camera does the job of extracting details from the Visiting Card and placing them in Contact details. The phone supports Java MIDP 2.0; hence you can install lot of applications and games. A document viewer comes installed that supports the following formats: MS Word, Excel, PPT, and PDF as well. Pre-installed games include Platinum Sudoku and Asphalt 2.

The phone has a full fledged HTML browser which is very good for surfing the web. Other software at your lease is File Manager, Google Search, Photo Editor, Voice Recorder, Calculator, Viewer, Email, STK, Modem, and Music ID. There were many instances when I felt that the screen wasn't optimally utilized. If there was an option of Landscape Mode for the browser, image editor as well as the games (especially racing,) it would have been really good. For games its game dependant whether to support landscape.

For Audio/Video Playback RealPlayer is provided with that supports a lot of video formats, but at the same time the player isn't the best to work with. Browsing through a list of songs seems like it will never end as the scroll speeds are dead-ly (read dead).