The Motorola MOTORAZR maxx V6 is a UMTS / HDSPA mobile phone with two cameras, video telephony, Java and more. How good is it really?
For me (geek / techie) the V6 is very easy to use in 99% of all cases. What I found non-intuitive in the beginning was configuring internet access for post-installed Java applications.
The phone features a phone book which can be synchronized via SyncML. However I cannot yet tell how good that works. I have not yet tested the SyncML feature of this phone.
The phone book is easy to use and has several good features. It is easy to add a photo taken with the camera of the phone to a contact. A contact can have several numbers. Having more than one number of the same type is possible.
I found two flaws in the phonebook so far:
Another goody: The phone will inform you if it's somebody's birthday when dialing one of his numbers.
The calendar is easy and intuitively to use. It supports appointments and tasks. Tasks can have a day. Tasks will get highlighted if they are overdue.
The reminder also works pretty well.
A serious flaw in the calendar is its incapability of displaying birthdays from the phone book. It's a shame that the calendar and the phone book do not integrate.
The phone does not have a feature for writing notes. If you want to take notes, you're forced to abuse the messaging system for that.
The music player plays MP3 and some proprietary formats that I'm not interested in. It does not support UTF-8 as character set. It does not support Ogg Vorbis. When playing songs, it will start decoding the next song only after the previous one is completely finished. That results in a short break between the songs which is very very annoying if you listen to mixes that are stored as separate MP3 tracks.
The music player can also be controlled if the mobile is closed, via touch keys on the outside. That is very cool and useful.
What I hate very much is the loudness control. It only knows mute plus 7 levels, and the most quiet one already is quite loud. I'd really like to have some more levels of loudness, especially in the more quiet range.
The poor multitasking of the phone seriously affects the music player. When activating the camera, music is paused for a few seconds. That is extremly annoying.
The Java Virtual Machine supported all the software that I tried. I could run Google Maps, Age of Empire III Mobile Edition, JmIrc (an IRC client), MidpSSH (a telnet and SSH client) and Opera Mini.
Java runs fast and smooth. Looking at Demo EXA Snowboarding, there also seems to be astonishing 3D support.
What is annoying is the Java sound. Somehow it's only controlling the volume, but that is tricky, as it is non-intuitive and doesn't work the way you'd expect it to work.
Also, setting up internet access for Java applets for the first time is non-trivial.
The phone supports at least SMS, MMS and E-Mail. Long SMS are automatically split up into concatenated SMS if not too many or converted to MMS. If a message has already been converted to MMS, there seems to be no way to convert it back to SMS, even if it's shortened enough. The only hack that I found to get the contents back into an SMS is edit the MMS, mark all text, copy it to the clipboard, go to the SMS and insert it there. But hey, yes, it has a clipboard and that clipboard works quite well.
I found the E-Mail client easy to configure and setup. But the multitasking within the E-Mail client is very bad. Considering that the mobile phone has much more CPU than my good old Amiga 500 had back 20 years ago, it's multitasking is extremely bad. When receiving E-Mail, reading or deleting mail is nearly impossible. With the delay, a selection of an E-Mail in the list will very likely select the wrong one: First you select, then you wait two seconds, then the list scrolls and then the selection is applied to the scrolled list, not the original one.
About the E-Mail client I very much dislike its incapability of saving attachments. I understand that the E-Mail client cannot show many file formats itself. But it should at least be able to store attachments to the SD card. That way I could store an attach PDF and then open it with my PC when I move the SD card or connect the mobile to my PC.
The E-Mail client does not support PGP.
Everything about the menus is good except one thing: It's too simple to accidently access the internet when you don't want to. I wonder if somebody already sued Vodafone to get some money back because of this.
The mobile has a Mini USB connector. With this connector, you can attach it to your PC or a head set. With an adapter, you can attach normal head phones, too. When connecting to a PC, you can choose how the phone should operate. It's easy to access the SD as mass storage without having to remove it from the mobile.
The mobile supports blue tooth. I've set it up to work with a Motorola Bluetooth headset, works fine.
The overall design of the phone is stylish and cool, though not as cool as the original StarTacs.
The materials used are extremely cheap. My phone is not yet 2 years old. The black paint on the case already is dissolving and disintegrating. That first started at the Motorola logo on the back of the case, then near the cameras.
As I'd expect from modern phones, this phone has an airplane mode. Airplane mode means the phone's internal GSM / UMTS feature is deactivated. You can still play music, run Java apps, use the Calendar or look at the phone book.
What I don't like about the airplane mode is its name. Hey, I also have to disable the GSM / UMTS feature when I go into a hospital, and a hospital is not an airplane. Also, I'd like to have easier access to disabling / enabling this.
The phone supports video telephony. Therefore it has two builtin cameras. One high resolution 2.0 megapixels camera (well, high resolution in comparison to the other builtin camera, of course 2.0 megapixels is not really high resolution...) for taking photos, and another camera with 640x480 pixels for video telephony.
As I already mentioned, the phone has a MicroSD slot. It originally was shipped with a 128 MB MicroSD card. I've replaced the original card with a 2 GB microSD card.
It's nearly impossible to remove the MicroSD card without a tool like a screwdriver or something similar to push / pull it out of its slot. Also, for changing the MicroSD card, the back of the phone needs to be opened. I would have rather wished for a mechanic that allows a much simpler change of the card and that works without removing the back cover.
That also means that I have not tested whether or not the MicroSD card can be replaced without switching the phone off. Because removing the MicroSD card is so difficult, I assume the phone must be switched off.
In the mean time, Sandisk have specified MicroSDHC for MicroSD cards with capacities larger than 2 GB.
The search feature of the website is complete shit. I've accessed the website through <↗http://www.motorola.de/>, entered the search string MOTORAZR V6 maxx
and received hits in all languages except German. The advanced search looks powerful, but the most basic feature, showing hits in the language that I'm interested in, is missing completely.
When browsing through the products, the link for mobile phones forcibly opened a new window. I hate if pseudo-web-designers think they need to force a surfing behavior onto me which I don't want!
The website says extensible memory with replacable MicroSD cards (up to 1 GB)
(↗full spec (German)). I can tell you that this is wrong. The 2 GB card that I've bought works just fine. I would really like to see that Motorola supplies more accurate information. I'd rather read from their website whether or not a 8 GB MicroSDHC card works in the MOTORAZR V6 maxx.
The URLs of the Motorola website are ugly. I wouldn't like linking to it. I don't know if Motorola recognizes that this actually is bad for them: No link to Motorola - no free add for their products.
The Motorola website was awfully slow when I accessed it. And the people doing it are technically completely incompetent bozos. They do not declare a document type, and they incompatibly mix SGML-based HTML with XML-based XHTML within the same document. The W3C Validator shows >200 errors on the average Motorola web page. I cannot understand how Motorola can be so unprofessional.
