The Motorola A920 is a chunky mobile phone with PDA capabilities.

The A920 measures 148 x 60 x 24 mm, and weighs 212 grams. It leans towards the PDA side of the mobile phone/PDA hybrid spectrum, since it doesn't have a keypad. Everything, including dialling, is done on the screen using a stylus on the touch screen.

The front of the phone is taken up with an enormous 40 x 61 mm 65k screen, which shows images and graphics really well. Below the screen is a four-way navigation wheel with an enter key in the middle, surrounded by the end call/power button, make/accept call button, '3' service hot key and a 'shortcut' key, which mostly acts as a 'go back' key.

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Above the screen are two game keys, A and B. These are only used in games, normally to select menu options. The only reason we can come up with for these keys is that they are required for the games to work on a phone without traditional soft keys. At the top of the phone is the camera, which functions as a video and still digital camera.

On the side of the A920 are two volume keys, a 'voice tag' key and a key that turns the speaker phone on and off.

The first screen (home page) on the A920 is colourful, and contains banners linking to services on the '3' network. While this is possibly convenient, we're also sure it's designed to encourage the use of the 3G network Hutchison spent a billion dollars or so installing.

Below the banners, in text form, are links to e-mails, voicemails, messages, appointments and active tasks. Below this is a bar with shortcuts to applications, and then a status bar. At the top of the screen is a menu bar, which works much the same as menu bars on your PC, and above this is an "application selector bar", with links to more applications. The home page is customisable.

The camera on the A920 rotates, allowing you to obtain images either facing you or facing away. The still camera can be set to three sizes (small, medium and large) and takes pictures of 640 x 480 resolution. Although for some reason it seems to always save it as a mirror image. The large image saves at about 58 kb, and produces good quality pictures.

The video camera takes reasonable images, but they can appear pixellated on the screen because the video resolution is lower than the screen resolution. Hutchison indicate a 12 second video message recorded by yourself will take up about 100 Kb. We found a 60 second clip took up 579 Kb of space. The call quality on the A920 is reasonable, and the video calling seems to have a higher quality than the NEC e606.

Text messages can be written in two ways - using the handwriting feature or the keyboard. The handwriting recognition technology is reasonably good, and we found that the A920 rarely misread a letter. While it takes the mobile a while to read the letter, possibly because it waits to make sure you are finished, there are two squares to write in. When you finish writing the letter in one square you can jump across to the other. It's awkward to learn but certainly speeds up data entry times.

Typing messages on the keyboard also takes longer than using a number pad, but we suspect practice would increase the speed and people with experience using PDA screen keyboards should be fine.

Multimedia messages are easy to create on the A920, and allow you to send video, pictures and sound with your messages. One good feature is the ability to record what you are sending on the spot, instead of having to prerecord it in a different location. You can also send and receive e-mail from the A920.

The processor could definitely be faster. Sometimes you press an icon and the phone doesn't appear to do anything, not even flash something to tell you it's busy. But it is trying to do something. For example, sometimes a game opens in the background, so you have the window in front but no menu bar, and you can't get to the game, so you have to restart the phone.

The Motorola A920 suffers from the same problem that affects most 3 phones, and in fact most high-end phones we've tested. The battery life is appalling. In our testing we couldn't even get the A920 to last a single day before dying out. To alleviate this Hutchison include two chargers with the mobile, so you can leave one at home and one at work, but this is still an area where more work is needed.

The PDA applications on the A920 are fairly basic, and include calendar, address book, notes, "to do", calculator and software to synchronise with your computer via cable. The A920 can synchronise with Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Organiser and Lotus Notes.

The A920 runs on a Symbian operating system, and the extra grunt of the PDA does improve the normal mobile functions. For example, the contacts have plenty of settings including multiple phone numbers and addresses, and you can include images and ringtones for the individuals.

The 8 Mb memory (expandable via an MMC/SD Card slot) means the A920 reads a lot of formats. The camera operates as a VGA and QCIF video camera, and the device can play MIDI, MP3, AMR and WAV audio files.

All in all, the A920 is a reasonable mobile phone/PDA hybrid, which distinguishes itself from similar devices with the ability to do live video calls. The big drawcard is still the 3 network, with its lower prices and higher data speeds.

Motorola A920
Company:  Motorola
Price: AU$920
Distributor:  3 Australia

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