Motorola V878

Print

Email

Bookmark

Share

Motorola lost its number one position to Nokia several years ago and has been deep in the shadow of the Finnish company since then. Of late, the American company has found even its number two position threatened by the aggressive and fast-improving Samsung Electronics. The petite camera clamshell V878, targeted at the Asian market, should stem the tide and help keep its rivals at bay.

Design
After the blocky E365, Motorola's design department now shows what it's really capable of with this well-engineered videocam clamshell. A sleek and stylish elongated rectangle with rounded corners, it would have been even more outstanding had Motorola's engineers somehow managed to conceal its long external antenna.

With its vital statistics at 82 x 42 x 21.5mm and tipping the scales at a mere 85g, the V878 is probably the most compact and handy full-featured mobile now available, It is finished in a brushed steel exterior and has its camera lens and flash beneath a gun-metal gray faceplate where the external display is located.

Internally, the keypad is well laid-out. One flaw in an otherwise very good finish is the inside ring of the directional pad which has a bit of a sharp edge to it. The buttons are responsive but some may find the number keys a little too flat and small for quick texting.

Interface
Motorola newbies may initially be overwhelmed by the mass of icons. Menu layout is, indeed, on the messy side. Thankfully, you can program keys to create shortcuts for easier navigation. One the whole, the user interface is fairly responsive with little or no lag.

Motorola has stuck to its own iTap predictive text system for SMS messaging. This however, is one of the major drawbacks of an otherwise very good phone. Users familiar with T9 may find the learning curve quite steep when adapting to the very much more cumbersome iTap system

For example, it requires up to six keystrokes just to put in a comma. Sentence beginnings aren't automatically capitalized, and you need to press and hold the key each time you need to change the capitalization. Inexplicably, iTap's punctuation key is set to apostrophe by default, instead of the more sensible full stop used by T9.

Another flaw in the messaging system is that you have to open each message before being able to delete it, unless you wish to remove all messages.

Multimedia
The V878 comes with 65,000-color screens for both its internal and external displays. The external LCD is smallish at 96 x 64 pixels but produces a sharp and bright image. It also doubles as an effective viewfinder for self-portraits. The internal TFT LCD isn't particularly large at 128 x 160 pixels, either, but is bright and offers clear, vibrant colors--one of the better displays we've seen.

The V878 sounds as good as it looks. The 40-chord polyphony is musical and crystal clear, again among the best we've come across. Volume gets loud enough for its ringtones but the default message alert tones may be a tad soft.

The built-in camera takes photos to a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. It has quite a few added options such as a limited flash, twilight mode and white balance control. Photos look very good on the handset and are acceptable when viewed from a PC.

We find the video capability of the mobile disappointing, however. Playback is jerky and blur, while video is tiny at 80 x 60 pixels. After shooting a scene, the phone takes a painfully long time to process and save it. Furthermore, Motorola has strangely adopted the Japanese "Nancy" format for video clips. This means clips taken with the V878 can be viewed only on other Motorola phones, while more conventional and widespread formats such as 3GP and MPEG-4 are not supported.

Phone memory is a rather paltry 2MB so you may need to transfer your photos and videos to your PC quite frequently if you want to save them. Bluetooth is left out as is an infrared port. Fortunately, Motorola provides a USB data cable as part of the package.

Other Features
Motorola has unfortunately decided not to offer an email client for this model. However, there are other frills making up for this. For example, the phone is capable of voice notes, voice dial and has a melody composer.

The V878 delivers quite a wide range of other customizable options as well. Photos can be attached to phonebook entries so your friend's face pops up on the external display whenever he calls. Ringtones can be set to downloaded melodies, but message tones can only be set to default ones.

The handset comes with three non-Java games and two Java games. All sport nice, clear graphics and good musical sound effects. However, the small and shallow keys make control of some of the games a little difficult.

Motorola provides software for synchronizing and transferring data between the phone and your PC, but compatibility is limited to Windows XP. Attempting to transfer pictures and video files using a PC running earlier versions of Windows may cause the computer to crash or freeze.

SAR, Reception And Battery Life
According to the manual, the highest SAR level measured for this model when tested for compliance was 0.7 W/kg on Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) tests. Based on the recommendations of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), this is well below the limit of 2.0 W/kg.

We found the V878's reception generally good, and we had no problems with signal strength and voice quality. The battery provided is a 600mAh Lithium-ion. Despite its lightweight specification, the battery allowed for about two to three days of usage which is decent for a multimedia phone.

Conclusion
The V878 goes for about S$898 without contract or S$698 with a two-year plan. The phone comes with one battery, a travel charger, a headset and a USB data cable. If you can forgive the iTap engine and forgettable video capability, you'll find this Motorola a commendable effort, which should win back some of their old fans and more than a few new ones.