Updated 14 Feb, 2012, 6:01 pm IST

REVIEWS / MOBILE PHONES / MOTOROLA MOBILITY INDIA PVT LTD

Motorola MOTOFONE F3

08 Dec, 2006, 5:42 pm IST | Aalaap Ghag | Mobile phones

The F3 also has voice prompts for all the actions in the phone. The main menu has six simple options, each with a voice that tells you what it is and/or what you need to do. The phone supports multiple languages and up to three per phone. The F3 that we received had Hindi, Punjabi and English. Other regional phones will include languages such as Tamil and Bengali. We found the voice prompts to be clear and consise, like “Read your messages”, but we think that the users (those who need voice prompts, speficially) are probably going to get confused at the second step which involves reading/writing in just six blocky characters. One thing I noticed was that all the voice prompts and even the ringtones are set in an ascending mode, so the they all start off in a low volume and increase gradually. This is okay for ringtones, but the first menu item (“Send a message”) is always in a low volume the first time you highlight it. Another argument is the language of the display itself. If people need to be told what to do in their local language, don’t you think they’d need to take classes in English if they have to read/write messages on the F3?

The six menu options are as follows:

Send a message
Read your messages
Call history
Change ringtone
Set Alarm
Change time

The phone has no iTap or T9, so you’re forced to use the multi-tap method to type your messages. Pardon me if I’m wrong, but I think T9 would be of use when you’re trying to make a phone that’s more accessible. Reading messages is also a bit painful because only one line is used to display the text, while the other one stays blank. Eh? Call history probably makes the best use of the available display: the entire number wraps up in the two lines, with the right arrow taking you to the next screen that shows you the date and time of the call. Simple and effective. The ringtones have no names, just numbers from one to seven. The tone preview also takes a little while to start. Alarm setting is simple – just enter time and press the OK/Menu key. The last icon, that looks like a settings icon, is to change the date and time. There’s no option to retrieve time from the ISP, which would have been a good feature for rural areas.

Overall, I think the UI makes fair use of the limited resources, but the same can’t be said about the display. Also, I’m not sure that Linux was really necessary in this phone. It works for the MING or the ROKR , but I think the FONE would have been better off with a cut-down, native UI. Not that it affects performance, but perhaps it would take lower power to run a proprietary native UI than a customized version of Linux.

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Tags: Motorola , MOTOFONE F3 , SCPL , Mobile Phones

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