Motorola A388 is a very good compromise of PDA and mobile phones. It is not the best PDA or best cellular phone available in the market; but at a price of 5178.00 (yes, that's what you get if you buy thru' Motorola ambassador program, you know someone in motorola, don't you?) it is the best value for money you can get. Details first: the phone is slightly more wide than most cellphones available today, and is definitely heavier.
It doesn't fit your pockets of shirt (or jeans), and Motorola addressed the problem by supplying a leather belt pouch with the phone. Because of clamshell model, the included handsfree comes handy! And the speaker quality of the headset is definitely better than the one fitted on the thin flap. It takes time to get used to the fact that that there is no keypad. What you have is the stylus, and poke the touchscreen that can simulate a keypad, a qwerty keyboard when needed. The menus are well arranged, and the icons and dialogs are intuitive and good.
The best part of it is handwriting recognition, and in 99% cases, the phone recognizes most people handwriting styles (except it has an eternal confusion which is 'o' and which is '@'). The bright backlit display can almost act as a tiny light source. Infrared works fine, but you can't exchange anything other than addressbook entries with mobiles from other vendors like Nokia. Voice quality is good; though the speaker in the thin flap can sure use improvement.
Even I wish the flap were thicker and more sturdy. Lack of keypad makes it mandatory to use your both hands and full attention to use the phone. So even at traffic signal you can't just pick up phone and say 'stuck in jam, will be late for meeting', as finding a number to call may require you to navigate thru' several menus/dialogs. There are a few software bugs, like you can't cancel the dialog box that pops up after each call telling you the balance. And if you just choose to key in a number, your address book's last chosen category becomes reset.
Syncing with PC is simple with windows, as the supplied CD works flawlessly. But in default settings, it created several unwanted categories in my phone's addressbook, which I didn't require. It doesn't talk Motorola's conventional starfish protocol, so from other operating systems (from Unix, e.g.) it is not possible to use open source sync softwares. It doesn't accept AT&F8 command.
Other AT commands works fine, and therefore I'm sure it'll work without issues as modem. It supports POP3/IMAP/SMTP, so can be a regular email client; though handling large volume or size of email is not possible at the RAM of this box is very limited. Moreover it can download only using its own modem via GSM/GPRS, where I wish it could use an external modem; and act just as an email user-agent.
At this price, it is really a good buy. Very soon we're going to carry a single device, that does all our communication and organization. This phone shows the way to low end users.
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