Motorola Yuva A810 review

Having lost my beloved motorola A1200 aka MotoMing phone to a fraud, I had to go on the hunt for a new phone. After much research and internet chat board debate I finalized two models the Motorokr E6 and the HTC Gene P3400i.They were both very competitively priced but the Gene beat the Motophone in almost every aspect. Bigger screen faster processor, ram and definitely a more user friendly OS, if only more vulnerable. When we went to the shop to buy the HTC, I noticed two aspects which turned me off from the phone permanently.Being the cheapest of the HTC models, its build was quite flimsy. I was afraid I would break it within the first month itself.The other problem was the SD card slot on the top had NO COVER! So what you had was a gaping hole on the top where water, moisture could get in.I have no idea why HTC made such a mistake when a rubber stopper cover is so cheap and effective. Anyway, long story short, the shop keeper then showed me the Moto Yuva A810, a derivative brother of the motorokr E6 and the latest model. In fact after having researched new phones for a week i hadnt even seen photos of it anywhere. But it was very competetively priced. At 7450 (approx 160$) it looked like a steal.
Now that I have used the phone for a good 24 hours, how is it? Read the first ever english review of the A810 to find out-


Specs
The following are the specs of the Motorola Yuva A810

General 2G Network Quad band
Announced 2008, June
Size Dimensions 105 x 51 x 14 mm
Weight 100 g
Display Type TFT touchscreen, 256K colors
Size 240 x 320 pixels, 2.2 inches
- Handwriting recognition
Ringtones Type Polyphonic, MP3
Customization Download
Vibration Yes
Memory Phonebook Yes, Photo call
Call records 30 dialed, 30 received, 30 missed calls
Card slot microSD (TransFlash), up to 2 GB, buy memory
Data GPRS Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 - 48 kbps
HSCSD No
EDGE Class 10, 236.8 kbps
3G No
WLAN No
Bluetooth Yes, v1.2 with A2DP
Infrared port No
USB Yes, v2.0
Features Messaging SMS, MMS, Email
Browser WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML (Opera v8.5)
Games Yes
Colors Excellent Black and White Shang-chi
Camera 2 MP, 1600x1200 pixels, video
- Java MIDP 2.0
- Stereo FM radio
- MP3/WAV/WMA/AAC+ player
- 3.5 mm audio output jack
- Voice memo
- Built-in handsfree
Battery Standard battery, Li-Ion 910 mAh
Stand-by Up to 150 h
Talk time Up to 4 h


As you can see, the Phone has a smaller screen than the Ming and the E6, smaller by approximately 0.2 inches. And don't be fooled by the tri-band listing in other websites, the India release model of the A810 is quad band.




Looks
Here are the different views of the phone. I don't know about you, but Motorola surely isn't going to win any awards with this design. It's functional and spartan and although the photos might make the blue outline seem okay but in person it looks a tad tacky. Still, without it it would have looked too empty. Below the touch screen there are 3 buttons. In the middle is the 5 way direction joystick. To the left is the cancel/switch off/switch on button and to the right is the select button, just in case you don't want to use the touchscreen. The left side of the phone sees the volume control and above that the 3.5 mm headset jack. On the top is the locking mechanism which has to be pressed to open the back of the phone. To the right side is the usb port which is used to charge the phone and connect to the PC. Below that is the Camera button followed by the locking key, which when slid up locks the phone and when slid down opens it up.
The rest of the looks of the camera is pretty clear from the pictures.


Screen
The screen is slightly smaller (0.2 inches to be exact) than the E6 and the rokr screens, but it looks sharp. The images appeared crystal clear, possibly even sharper than the ming. I realize this shouldn't be mentioned here, but in the ming if the photos used were more or less around the same size, it would fit most of the photo, chopping out a part of it. Here it fits the entire image, which is good, but the resizing leaves space either on the top/bottom or the sides.which shows up as white bars.



Calls messaging and other features.
I made Local , STD and International calls and the reception and voice clarity was pretty good. One major glitch, one of the few crippling things about this revamped OS (or is it old? i don't know) was when I sent queries to the network, like showing an on screen balance. The phone just stuck to the requesting screen and you could see the cursor blinking on the screen behind it , after quite a while a message box appears but its blank. I tried it quite a few times, with 2 different networks and still the problem persisted.
Overall the new look of the OS essentially means fancier icons, in reality it is more or less the same as the ming or the E6. Although I found the response time to be much slower than the ming, which was my previous phone. Even the simplest tasks , like opening the alarm clock took a good 2.5 seconds. Don't get me wrong, the ming was slow too, but this was frustrating. I thought that this was because of the 2gb memory card I had put in, so I changed it and put in a 512 mb card to check if the response became faster( this has been known to happen with smart phones, putting in their max capacity memory card sometimes slows it down). But sadly this had nothing to do with the memory card, even with the 512 mb completely blank card, it took exactly the same time to open up each and every icon. Again my gut instinct tells me that this is some fatal flaw in the OS. On the other hand, strangely, changing the color scheme of the phone, something that took the ming nearly 8-11 seconds to do, happened instantly each and every time with this phone.It was blazing fast in this aspect.The start up and shut down menu also has gone through some changes and it looks fancier.But how do these things matter when in the real performance as a touchscreen phone it is slow?


Music and Video
The media player and video player are separate now and its not real player anymore. Playback was quite fine, but a few minor issues- the volume control is a step up control, meaning it increases by about 12% for every mark on the volume level. If the real player could have a progressive control, then why couldn't the supposedly new player have this?
The earphones given with this handset is so bad that i cant even begin to talk about it. The sound wasn't good in this. I attached my isound DJ monitoring headphone to the phone and listened to quite a of tracks. Music playback was quite good , at least for a non audiophile like me it was quite satisfactory. Still, I strongly recommend people should factor in buying another headset to enjoy music on this phone. The Creative EP 630 is highly recommended, it comes with noise isolation.
As for the video playback it was decent,but it does not support real media files anymore.
The phone has only played mp4 and 3gp videos until now, and i sincerely hope that this is not what motorola had in mind when they were advertising this as a media phone. Maybe an update will solve that?

Other changes in the phone include having a button for connecting to the computer, which means that just attaching the wire wont do, you have to activate it from the phone itself.The phone also has additional icons from yatra.com ,presssmart and google , but I couldn't check how good its internet connection was since my GPRS wasn't activated yet. The phone also has EDGE.

Photo Editor
The photo editor was quite disappointing. when you open a large file, it opens in the actual size and you cant resize it to fit the screen with the editing options available. This is highly irritating, specially since the 3 year old motoming had this feature.I cant understand why motorola chose not to include this. The open with option has been changed to edit, and in most cases ,i.e, any file above 110 kb the editing software refuses to open saying its too big. I can understand that motorola needed to downscale the phone, but this is ridiculous. The ming could easily open upto 250kb files.


The phones auto lock feature is a bit weird. And from what i read online it seems to be similar to the rokr. With the ming you could arrange it so that it asks for a password when you want to unlock it. But in this phone it can be opened with the slide to unlock key. So basically its not secure. The only time it asks for a code is when you restart the phone. I cant say i am happy with this. But then again, other phones have this feature, so i can only assume its popular.

Games
The phone has something called Krishcricket, which is basically a set of cricket games, which i found to be quite boring.

Camera & Video
My initial impression was that the camera was lightyears ahead of the ming, but now i am not so sure. I will try posting some images so you can have a comparative idea as to how good they are, i will post some more photos as the week progresses. I have 2 cameras, so a camera phone was not a priority for me. But it seems to take decent photos, so I am satisfied. One thing though, the live preview on this phone seems to be lagging behind , it feels choppy.The ming had a slight lag too,but this is more noticeable. And it takes much longer to save an image. The video is decent, I felt it was more or less at par with videos taken by the ming.

Conclusion
The phone is aimed for people who want a smart phone on a tight budget. Understandably, motorola had to make compromises to fit it into a lesser budget. Therefore the smaller screen. But motorola seems to have jumped into the fray without being fully prepared for this. The OS has quite a few flaws, and the reaction time to every instruction can be irritating.
But from what little i could find out, the configuration is around the same as the ming, and it shouldn't be slow. I blame the OS for this. Even though the OS looks snazzy, it has problems. It will need a LOT of tweaking.

Some minor complaints. So many people on their own have designed skins and themes for the linux based phones, motorola couldn't be inspired by them? A phone aimed to be a media/fun phone it still has only 3 color schemes, black, blue and white(the same as the ming). Quite disappointing. A media phone should allow for some level of customization, and this was not satisfactory. But wait! It gets better. I tried the installation cd which would update the motorola software. But the software didn't even recognize the phone! A quick check on the motorola website revealed that this phone wasn't even on their website yet.This is just sloppy. The software therefore couldn't find any updates because they hadn't even included it.
Starting the Motorola phone tools software also caused problems, every time it reached 100% it stuck there,but I am willing to concede it might be a problem with my computer.I will try it on another computer and post if i get a favorable response. The price tag makes this phone a steal yes, but I don't think this is the right time to buy this phone. Its very new and it definitely needs some updates in its OS.
If this is the phone you want, then wait a while, keep checking the motorolafans and motorola website. While on the surface level this phone might be snazzy, but take it from me, a motorola fan,the company should have done some more work on this phone. Let's hope motorola fixes these issues soon. But if the time lags arn't an issue for you, then this is a good phone. As for me, if this is indeed an OS issue, I hope that Motorola quickly releases an update which solves this.
I hope this review was helpful for you, I realize this is hardly a 100% proffessional review but I have tried to make it as comprehensive as possible.
Lastly, some comparative shots of photos taken by the A810 and the nokia 3500c
Nokia



A810