Updated 15 Feb, 2012, 6:16 pm IST

REVIEWS / MOBILE PHONES / MOTOROLA MOBILITY INDIA PVT LTD

Motorola Aura Mobile Phone

20 Apr, 2009, 3:33 pm IST | Shayne Rana | Mobile phones

Connectivity
The Aura supports EDGE and GPRS. It’s a pity they couldn’t fit Wi-Fi or even 3G in the budget. Motorola and BPL, sorry, Loop Mobile, don’t seem to get along as there was no pre loaded option for my service although there were settings readily available for Vodafone, Airtel and even idea. Loop was not very useful when it came to providing settings for the handset as usual and since there’re currently undergoing a change, the original settings have been altered and the website is not as helpful as it was when BPL was in charge. I used a friends a friend’s Vodafone chip as my final recourse.

But back to the browser, once again like the video player, you’ll see a box inside a circle. It’s not all that bad but because of the screen being so small, it’s not all that easy to read or navigate. You can use the Fit to Screen option and that puts things in a slightly different perspective, but there’s not too much of a difference. You can also opt to have the font display Large, which makes things a little untidy and that also means you’ll have to scroll a lot more. The browser, like in their other handset also allows you to open multiple pages.

The handset also supports Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and A2DP. USB 2.0 enables data transfer to quite speedy. The absence of yet another feature – GPS is also very evident. Google Maps look far too tiny in their boxed in setting and the menus are very tiny.

You can download your personal emails via the POP and IMAP service that the Aura has, like other handsets. Gmail for Mobile is also an issues as it arrears in a box as well and the font is too small.

Misc. Features
Other, more mundane features like a calendar for keeping schedules and appointments, Task manager, Notes, a World Clock, Alarm and Calculator are all present and accounted for. Here too a few things are lacking like a converter and some for of a Mobile Tracker at least. After all, this is a rather expensive handset and wouldn’t you want to get it back if it went missing? While it may seem like some of Motorola’s own proprietary features like Motorola TEXT for backing up your text messages and Motorola BackUp for data are absent, Vufone, which is an integration of all of these is available. It’s a paid service but it’s quite worth it and very capable. Click here for more information.

Motorola’s Crystal Talk technology seems to be far batter with the Aura than some of the other handset’s I’ve tested. In the many conversations I had it was only on one occasion that the static was more than I could handle, but I also presume that was disturbance form the other end. People I called could always hear my voice clearly.

You will not be able to read any office documents unless they’re in .TXT format. This means that other than an eBook reader the handset is almost useless when it comes to any sort of business functionality.

Camera
I think they could have cut costs and gone with a 1.3 or VGA instead of a 2 megapixel lens. It baffles me as to why a handset with such a price couldn’t even have autofocus, even a 3.2MP would have helped. The camera settings are also very basic – White Balance, Color options, Scene modes that consist of Night and Automatic only, Multi Shot and an Auto timer.

Pictures taken in decent lighting are quite average but not always. Low light conditions make for very grainy images. You'll also have to have a very steady hand. On the handset's display though the images look absolutely perfect. So if you're going to just store and show images on the phone or use them as wallpapers you'll have no issues.

For a 2MP camera the night shot was not too bad though.

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