Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Courtesy of the Hill and Knowlton (Hill and Knowlton Blog) Motorola Bloggers Relation Program, I picked up my free trial Motorola KRZR K1 phone (complete with new phone number and unfortunately locked to Rogers) yesterday. Bottom line so far: for the power multi-media creator user, Nokia's phones are much better and I would pay my own money for a Nokia N95 or N93 or my mythical N999, I wouldn't pay my own money for the KRZR.

Cool

1. Came in an awesome aluminum briefcase
2. Great form factor and light weight
3. USB Charging
4. Text Auto Complete even with ITAP turned off
5. Camera has a nice mirror for self portraits

NOT COOL:

1. Cheesy Operating System (ugly to me but YMMV)
2. Adapter for normal headphones must be unplugged to answer a call!
3. no flash for camera - Nokia flash is not great but better than nothing. Sony Ericsson flashes are much better!
4. the web browser doesn't allow you to change the home page (Rogers bug not Motorola bug?)
5. the web browser is primitive and bad - sorry to be harsh, but compared to Nokia's Web kit browser or Opera, this browser is a toy: it doesn't support upload of attachments to mobile gmail, no way to enter a URL to surf to (you have to create a bookmark), many, many problems
6. ShoZu doesn't work on this phone (Rogers bug?). A phone without ShoZu is like a phone without sunshine :-) !
7. No WiFi - I wouldn't pay my own money for a phone without WiFi
8. No obvious way to upload your photos or videos without going through USB or Bluetooth "chain of pain" - I prefer ShoZu but there's no support to upload photos to flickr and photos and video to Vox which the built in Nokia gallery app on all recent N series phones does
9. Voice Recognition doesn't work for all commands (e,g, I can't turn off Bluetooth with a voice command)

The first in my occasional series of videoblogs where real people review smartphones. In this installment, Zak Greant reviews the Sony Ericsson W810i. He likes it but it's still a bit rough around the edges (e.g. no real integration with iTunes or any other music player app). As an open source evangelist for eZ Systems and formerly sxip and MySQL as well as doing work for Mozilla Foundation and others, Zak travels a lot, so he loves the quad band. Of course Zak bought the phone outside of Canada since it was not available in Canada at that time. Finally, come on Sony and Nokia, put standard headphone jacks in your music phones!

[NOTE to self, turn image stabilization on next time and film in a place with more light than Take 5.]

6 minutes 10 seconds, recorded 19 December 2006 at Take 5 Cafe at 429 Granville using a Nokia N93 at 640x480 30fps in MPEG-4 format