Motorola and DoCoMo mate 3G and Wi-Fi on newest handset

Big in Japan

22 June 2005 20:44 GMT / By Kenneth Henry

Whether you change your phone once a month or every 5 years, everybody knows that having as many standards as possible on your handset gives the user better coverage for travel, and bigger sales to the manufacturer.

That's partially the thinking behind Motorola teaming up with Japanese telecoms giant NTT DoCoMo, who have taken Motorola's popular but opinion-dividing A1000 as the shell (reviewed http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/review.php?reviewId=697 here) and added Wi-Fi (802.11b) to its existing support for 3G, GSM, GPRS and WCDMA networks. It also keeps the A1000's touch-sensitive, 2.9in TFT screen at 208 x 320 in 65k colour shades as well as the 1.2 megapixel still camera and a 300,000 pixel video camera.

The M1000 is rated for 1 hour and 20 minutes of videoconferencing over a 3G network, Just over 4 hours of GSM talktime, or up to 200 hours on standby, and synchronise with your PC over the now-commonplace USB or Bluetooth 1.1 if you want to stay wireless but in the vicinity.

It'll pack a host of file viewers for popular formats, such as Adobe's PDF, the major Office files, .ZIP files, .JPEG and PNG for pictures. It can also run Java Applets, although given the latest browser flaws are based on Javascript, we don't envisage those getting popular until after an update. The browser will be Opera 7.5 running on Symbian, but leaving the enclosed Transflash Memory card at 32MB spells instant upgrade.

Whether or not this new specification will attract overseas buyers is moot at the moment - it'll stay big in Japan only for the foreseeable future, presumably until the stocks of A1000s become exhausted in Europe. It'll certainly be good to give it a test and see whether it's improved over its older brother beyond the extra standards.

Full tags

Phones, Mobile phones, 3G, Motorola