Motorola E680 Review

Overall Rating

Good colour screen and resolution.
Solid feel to it
SD expansion slot very useful especially the ability to read more than 1GB.
Voice command really cool.
4X zoom on the camera not too bad.

Position of thumbwheel a bit fiddly and not ideally located. A jog dial at the side of the phone will be more ideal just like the SE-P800 and 900 series.
Does not have ability to rotate images.
Audio quality not as good as the Motorola E398 despite being touted as surround sound.
SMS text to speech function useless as most people use short forms and the phone cannot read out the words, but individual letters instead.
Text input using the handwriting recognition is utterly useless. Should try to emulate the ones used on the SE P800 and 900 series.
Keyboard input also useless as the text size is too small.
Low battery life.

I've been using the Sony Ericsson P800 for over a year now and I've just bought the E680 to replace the P800.

CONS
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First impression of the phone was relatively good. However, after playing with it for an hour, it dawned upon me that the phone is not up to par with the SE series of PDA phones. The activation of certain menu on-screen is not intuitive as compared to the SE. You cannot change the icons on top of the menu for the Motorola, but you can do so on the SE.

Next the handwriting recognition is totally disappointing. When you use the SE, the text input is relatively easy and fast. However the E680's input is EXTREMELY SLOW.....I mean it !!

You have to key in one character at the time and the recognition is not as accurate as the SE. I have very neat and straight handwriting and lots of people have commented highly on it. With the Motorola E680, I've completely given up hope on trying to write with the hardwriting input.

Trying to SMS using this phone also poses a lot of problems as you need to use two hands to do it. You cannot use the actual keypad found on the SE800, 900 or 910i to SMS as the E680 doesn't have a keypad. Considering the price I paid for the phone, I would actually expect a full-fledge Opera-type browser, but what we are given is only a WAP browser which is completely useless as you cannot use it to browse the other websites.

PROS
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The only good thing I can say about the E680 is that the package is smaller than the SE series and this makes it very easy to carry about.

I like the ability to read MP4, MP3 and Realmedia format files.

Apart from that, I think I'll send my SE-P800 for repairs rather than to struggle with the E680's interface.