Motorola V600 Aston Martin Edition Review

Speaking of that software, it is kind of a mixed bag. The initial setup was very nice. It used my Bluetooth adapter to search for the phone, pair with it, and create the connections needed to use it as a GPRS modem and to use it with the PhoneTool software. Now I just run the software and it automatically connects to the V600, unlike the software supplied with Sony Ericsson handsets. Once connected you can either copy over contacts to/from Outlook and the V600, or synchronize them. I recommend the copy method, as the sync seemed confused by the various phone numbers for a single contact in Outlook (it kept prompting for number type). Additionally, it always seems to mix the SIM and main memory contacts of the phone together. I certainly don't want the SIM numbers in my outlook, especially since most all of them are duplicates of the regular numbers that I keep for one I need to put the SIM into a phone that is not mine. The system just doesn't work all that well for sync, so I would just stick with the copy function.

The other features of the software work well. The phone browser is very nice and makes it easy to fetch photos or ringtones from the phone. There is support for creating SMS or email messages on the PC, too. You can also connect to the Internet with the phone's GPRS system using this application. It worked well.

If you are using the GPRS system just from the phone, you might find it a bit complicated to setup. But once you figure out that you have to define a "Web Session" in order to use GPRS, you are fine. The GPRS system worked well, and seemed relatively speedy. No real complaints.

As mentioned earlier, there is no IR port on the V600. I find that odd. You can use a cable, though. The V600 is compatible with the same cable used on the T720 series.

iTap or T9?

It has been interesting to watch the development of Motorola's predictive text system over the years. iTap, as it is known, has never really been a contender when compared to Tegic's T9 system. T9 is almost universally used by all of the manufacturers except Motorola. But with the current version of iTap, Motorola has gotten very close to not only offering a system that is "as good as", but very close to offering one that is better than T9.

One of the best new features of the current iTap system is word completion. When you are entering a word, just as you would with T9, iTap will try to complete the word for you by showing the suggestion as gray letters after the cursor. If you see the word you want, you just hit up on the d-pad to accept the word and move on to entering in the next word. This is a great idea, truly. Imagine my delight when I was configuring the email client and had to enter in the POP server's name and saw it pop up as a suggested word because I had entered it once already as the SMTP server. That saved me a lot of effort, and I really appreciated it. But the system is good for regular messages, too, if not quite as useful all the time. You can also define your preferred primary and secondary input methods. In my case, I like that I can define iTap English as primary and iTap German as secondary, and quickly switch between them.

But iTap has its faults. For one, pressing the 1 button defaults to putting the number 1 in the word instead of putting a period. If you enter a space after the word, the 1 key will default to a period, but not if you are at the end of a word. This is real annoying, as you either have to waste a character at the end of each sentence, or you need to waste a keystroke to select the period instead of the 1. What were they thinking? The other problem is the input speed. As I mentioned in the UI section, the V600 is a bit sluggish in general. Fast texters will be disappointed.

 

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