Motorola E680 Review

Overall Rating

Nice study design
Good resolution color screen
Accepts media files like wav, mid, mp3, mp4, rm and 3gp.
Sleek design with minimal protrusions
Accepts 1GB SD Card and comes with a 64MB SD(transflash in adapter).
Loud and clear speakers with minimal distortion
Mail setup very easy to configure.
Video & audio playback very good and fast.
Customisable themes for color, ring alerts, background and foreground screens.

No full fledge web browser. Only comes with WAP browser.
Very slow text input using handwriting recognition. Character recognition not very accurate. Oh, did I mention that the recognition is very slow.....yes I did!!!
Need to write within two small confined boxes measuring 11mm X 12mm only.
Difficult to use keyboard input too as the keys are too small.
When typing an SMS, the Send Button is located too close the Space Bar. This may inadvertently cause you to send out the msg even before you've completed your msg.
Not many downloadable games, ringtones or Java apps.
Interface non-intuitive as compared to other PDA-Phone combo. Need to open up multiple screens before you can actually access the apps that you want.
Placement of rocker wheel in centre of phone not ideal nor ergonomic.
Considering that this is a new phone and the price, the camera phone only has VGA resolution.
Unable to customise most frequently used application on the top menu bar unlike SE. You still need to nagivate to multiple windows before actually reaching your desired application.
Instruction manual very brief and doesn't give you specific details.

Just bought a Motorola E680 recently to replace my SE-P800. Ever since using this phone for about a week, I have a better understanding of the idiosyncrasies of this phone.

Although a new user to the PDA/phone area may be impressed by the bells and whistles as compared to the usual 'dumb' phones, seasoned users of SmartPhones such as the O2, Treo and Sony Ericsson may find that this phone is still lagging behind its competitors.

Although I would have preferred to buy the SE-P910i, it costs more than S$1388 as opposed to S$838 for the E680. I do have a tinge of regret getting the E680 as the application is still not as refined as the SE or O2.

The interface for the SE is really user-friendly and intuitive as opposed to the E680.

Multimedia wise, the E680 can hold its own against the bigger boys. The built-in 3D speakers are probably the best as compared to the SE or O2 (its smaller sibbling, the E398 has a better resonance with surround effect).
One thing I like about the E680 is its ability to playback a myriad of formats ranging from MP3, MP4, RM, WAV, MIDI and 3GP. Frame rate is relatively decent if you encode your video properly.

The color screen is very clear and vibrant and the resolution is surprisingly better than the bigger SE900. However, the physical size of the screen has some disadvantages as the keyboard input is gonna be very challenging for the myopics. Furthermore, as mentioned in the summary of bad points, the input method or handwriting recognition still have a long way to go. It can only recognise one character at a time as compared to the competitors. Just hope that Motorola will have a firmware upgrade to address this issue.

If you intend to use this thing mainly as a PDA, you are gonna to be disappointed. But then again, you may also be disappointed if you intend to use this as a phone as the SMS features is still poor basically because of the immaturity of the text input method.

The other thing I dun like about this phone is that you cannot rotate or view the photo in full-size (scrollable is still acceptable). It will automatically fit to page and you cannot zoom in unless you click on EDIT. Another gripe is that you cannot select a few photos and delete the selected ones. Somehow, you can either delete one at a time or Delete All.

Hopefully, Motorola can come up with a firmware upgrade to address this issues just like SE did with the P800.