motorola a1000 review

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Picture courtesy of Amit.

Average Ratings

Value for Money	8.3/10
Reviewer Rating	8.2/10
Overall Rating	8.6/10

85% Recommended11 out of 13 Reviews

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By darrenforster99 on 16th Jun 2007

darrenforster99's Ratings

Reviewers Network	3
Time Phone Owned	Over 1 Year
Screen Quality	10/10
Battery Life	6/10
Features	10/10
Reception	10/10
Style	10/10
Value for money	10/10
Overall value	10/10
darrenforster99's recommendation

Good Points

Touch screen phone
GPS
Bluetooth
Microsoft document viewer
Symbian OS (unlocked)
PDF reader
Everything the A920 should have been
PDA & Phone in one

Bad Points

Battery life is better than the A920, but not that good, then again with all the features the battery life is very good.
Handwriting recognition a bit hard to use.

General Comments

The A1000 is a superb phone. It is one of the best phones out there. I originally got an A920 phone when I joined 3 about 5 years ago. The A920 was severely crippled by 3. The features on the A920 were ahead of there time, unfortunately 3 disabled them all as they were concerned that people could easily abuse all this extra power (despite the previous A835 having most of the things except a touch screen as the A920). Then a few months later the A925 was released by 3, this was at the time when all the other phone companies had already released most of the technology in the A920 without any problems, so 3 uncrippled the phone (and offered free firmware upgrades to A920 owners, the upgrade was quite hard to get though, 3 told me to take mine to Carphone Warehouse and they'd do it, Carphone Warehouse didn't have a clue what I was on about, so in the end I gave up and upgraded the phone to the A1000). The A1000 was by far even more technologically advanced than either the A920 or the A925. It had all the A920 disabled facilities enabled (Bluetooth, GPS, AGPS, Symbian unlocked so programs could be installed, Infra-Red, etc) and more (PDF reader, Microsoft Office document reader). The other really good thing about the A1000 was it's size, it was even smaller and more stylish than the A920/A925. The A920/925's both resembled the old satellite phones and looked like you were carrying a brick. One advantage to this was that if it went missing you'd know straight away that you'd lost it, but the A1000 was severly trimmed down, not much bigger than a Nokia NK402.

One really good thing with the A1000 is the touch screen. This to me is a superb idea and it really surprises me that not many other manufacturers have caught on with this, instead they've started hiding the keypad under a sliding mechanism or in a clamshell and not providing the user with any type of keyboard (instead leaving them to keep pressing numbers to get various letters).

The good thing with the touch screen is that the screen can change to what the users doing. So when watching a video the entire front face of the phone can be used to watch the video with no keys taking up part of that vital space. Then when texting the screen can change to be a full keyboard (or even handwriting recognition - although this wasn't as easy to use as you could only put in two letters at a time, it was a bit more easier once you got used to it). And then when making a phone call the screen changes again to a full screen number-pad for entering the numbers, this is really good for anyone who either has bigger thumbs for some of these smaller keypads as the digits are quite big taking up the entire screen of the phone and it's great that Motorola have also thought about people with visual problems who might have problems seeing the smaller numbers used on some of the modern handsets as the numbers are quite large.

Overall this is a very good phone and even though it's a few years old now is still ahead of it's time with it's touchscreen navigation. At the moment Motorola are working on a new phone to overtake this one called the A1200 which now has been given a 4 letter word - The Moto MING. The only bad point with the MING compared to the A1000 is the cover over the touchscreen, whilst this does protect it from being touched whilst in pockets (there is a screen lock on the A1000 anyway) it just seems to make it more fiddly to use, like the clamshell phones and also adds to the size of the phone. Also the 4 letter acronym that Moto has chosen for this phone may reduce it's demand in the UK as MING or MING-er is quite often used to describe someone who is doing something disgusting - but then again no-one Wii'd on Nintendo's bonfire with their strangely named games console so who knows what will happen to the Moto MING, will the next generation all be MING-er's?

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