Battery life is a bit lower than I expected given the fact that the main bulk of the phone is its huge battery: both in capacity (1600 mAh) and in actual space it occupies. The phone managed about 3 hours of GSM calls and about 5 days of stand-by. WiFi and Bluetooth can't be used together (their hardware runs at the same frequency and they conflict so Motorola only allows one or the other), but in our tests the phone managed over 4 hours of WiFi usage, which is pretty good.
Regarding the cameras: Quality is better that someone would expect from a phone camera, although the absense of a flash is a bit disappointing. Nevertheless, there is Night mode support, mirroring and a self-timer. There are also settings to setup the look of the snapped picture with options of "Sunny", "indoor home" and "indoor office". The user can also choose which camera to use to snap pictures of video (front or rear camera) and where to save the media (main memory or transflash storage card). When viewing an existing snapped picture you can choose from many eidting tools: Crop, Rotate, Rescale, Colour, Pen size, Eraser.
The video grabbing application also supports muting and you can set either 300 or 12 seconds of recording. Unlimited recording is not supported. The video application grabs video at 176x144 (but can display in fullscreen and in landscape mode). Here is a sample of video recording using the front camera and one from the rear one. The phone can playback 3GPP, MP4, WMVver8 (and WMA) and ASF.
Symbian and UIQ:
UIQ has a very weird user interface for sending pictures/video over Bluetooth. There is no proper file manager in the phone (although Symbian has a real filesystem) and only 5 folders are visible from specific applications (e.g. audio, video, image, document and other). If you have some files on "Other" folder there is no way to send them over to another device via Bluetooth. You will need to find a special app to "understand" that "Other" folder and make it visible to the user to select files from it to send or manipulate. To send images/video for example, you have to load their respective apps, then select the file you want to send/manipulate, let the file fully load on your screen (e.g. playback a video) and THEN it will let you delete it or send it. The whole user interface has the exact same kind of "unpolishedness" and weird UI design decisions that can confuse users. It's just that there are options at places that you would never expected them (e.g. random files received via Bluetooth can only be accessed by the "Email/SMS" application)!
In the product's defense, the phone is extremely stable. Not only has the OS itself proven super stable (much more than any of my Linux phones or my Windows Mobile smartphone), but even the third party apps I installed. The OS is also pretty fast too, though the experience would have been better if the phone would boot faster (currently a whopping 70 secs) and the virtual keyboard popup window was faster to launch (takes 2 seconds to load the keyboard each time)! Thankfully, the input options are plentyful: you can use T9 using your thumbs as well as using a full virtual keyboard, or a special pre-defined phrases (e.g. "Hi, how are you?"). There is also handwritting support for Japanese but you can train the application to also recognize English.
There are a number of apps that come with the phone: a calendar and appointment/alarm support, a task utility, a basic thumb calculator, an mp3 music player (which it wouldn't read my mp3s on my microSD card but could read them from the internal memory), a Notes application, SyncML, a Time utility showing times for two locations, a voice memo application that records AMR and of course, the heavyweight apps: Opera 7.5 (with tabs, landscape and fullscreen support), the very fast Picsel Viewer 1.0.33 (supports PPT, DOC, XLS, PDF and ZIP, TXT, WMF, BMP and HTML source), the McAffee AntiVirus utility, a Japanese-to-English dictionary, moviaVPN (supports a number of gateways and policies), and a Desktop Suite utility which connects to the Windows XP part of the application that allows to easily modify or send office documents to your phone. Finally, the phone comes with MIDP-2 java support, Opera Mini 2.0 ran great for example! Please note that some Java games that don't "understand" touchscreens and require hardware buttons won't be able to work on any such smartphones.
In the settings panel of the phone you can find many options, including: rename/format the storage card, install/uninstall apps, assign security locks, power settings, screen calibration and brightness level, assign different apps to the hardware keys, sound settings for different actions, MIDlet permissions, currency and time settings, GPRS counter, and a Bluetooth pref panel. However, it was quite a shock to see the "Phone Information" screen of the phone and read that the phone model named as "Reference Platform" instead of "Motorola M1000". To me, both as a user and reviewer, this showed me that Motorola didn't put lots of enthusiasm on this product and if I were a manager at Motorola-Japan, I would have fired the person responsible on the spot for this oversight that degrades the professional look of the product in the eyes of the consumer. I can live with a few bugs, software engineering is complex these days. But for something as eye-popping, I can't forgive.
The greatest feature of any smartphone is its native third party applications. And UIQ has plenty: over 400 of them. I successfully installed Sman 1.4 (very important to close applications rather than just minimize them in order to save main memory), Explorer4U and Handy Explorer (great commercial file managers), Agile Messenger (ICQ, Y!, AOL and MSN support), AvantGo, Netfront 3.1, OggPlay, TCPMP with support for many video and music formats (finds media on the Transflash's "Media Files" folder) and more. I believe that business users will be pretty happy with the amount of office and professional software available out there for UIQ.
Conclusion:
The Motorola M1000 is a good phone, but if Motorola were to fix the mentioned few outstanding issues and hadn't removed MMS support, it would have been an excellent phone. Nevertheless, it's still a good device and moreover, it is the most affordable unlocked WiFi 3G phone in the market today at just $290. I dare you to find online another WiFi-capable unlocked, brand new, 3G phone that comes with a desktop cradle at such a price: you won't be able to. Do you need a big screen, loads of native applications, WiFi and Office support on your phone? Then that's the phone for you. And especially if you are travelling to Japan for business, this product is your best bet.
Pros:
- Ultra stable
- WiFi support
- Twin cameras
- Bright, large screen
- Good business software
- Multiple text input options
- Great quality stereo speakers
- True multitasking with Symbian
- Over 400 native third party apps available
Cons:
- Proprietary audio jack
- No EMS/MMS support
- Battery status has only 3 levels
- WiFi & BT can't be ON at the same time
- Contacts application not fully localised for English
- Voicemail number autodetection didn't work (Cingular)
- UIQ 2.1 not as file manager friendly as it could have been
Overall: 7/10
- "M1000, Page 1/2"
- "M1000, Page 2/2"
