Date:21/12/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/12/21/stories/2008122154421300.htm
Front Page Guide me - or sing to me Anand Parthasarathy Motorola's latest mobile phones can do either -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MotoMing offers touch, voice-based navigation New MotoYuva model is phone-MP3 player-FM radio -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- GUIDE OR MUSE?: While the MotoMing A1600 (left) is 30-city navigator, the MotoYuva W396 is a music-multimedia phone. Bangalore: Over Rs. 10,000 separates the asking price of two recent mobile handsets launched in India by Motorola. And depending on your inclination (and purse), your phone will guide you across 30 cities in India - or just sing to you through its MP3 player or FM radio. The MotoMing A1600 took its time reaching India - but Motorola's first Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled phone for this market comes with some interesting pluses: Its navigation feature (voice-guided, turn by turn, if you want it that way) includes lifetime access to the maps of some 30 Indian cities. What's really useful is that you can use the handset as navigator without switching on the phone feature - even without inserting a SIM card. The phone proper has a large 1 gigabyte memory expandable to 4 GB - so it's sufficiently powered for professional browsing applications. They have included a business card reader. The 3.2 megapixel camera with 8x zoom can, at a pinch, capture pictures of print-reproducible quality, an important feature in this era of citizen journalism. The built-in MP3 player and Motorola's web-based MotoMusic store will appeal to those who don't want to carry a separate player. The screen is touch-sensitive and the soft keypad is fairly easy to use even for the thick fingered. At around Rs. 15,000, the MotoMing A1600 is competitively priced for the GPS-smart phone category, and interestingly, the makers seem to have gone in for a Linux-based system to drive the software. A more recent launch is the latest in Motorola's made-for-India MotoYuva series, the W396, which is a stereophonic MP3 player-cum-FM radio with a somewhat basic camera thrown in. You can enhance its storage with a 2GB card and like the GPS feature in the MotoMing, the camera-player-radio here is independent of the main phone. This means you can switch off the phone while travelling by air and still enjoy the music functionality. Music can be recorded straight off the FM radio or downloaded from MotoMusic. The phone is now selling for between Rs. 4200 and Rs. 4400 depending on dealer discounts. For music buffs, a good buy, with excellent sound quality. To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
