E-TEN M800 - no buttons again

Introduction, packaging

E-TEN glofiish M800, the phone said to be the great competitor of Kaiser, has arrived to us, even if a bit late. I had a hands-on experience with the brother of it, X800, about half a year ago, so the QWERTY edition with touchkeys didn’t have a great impression on us. Still, we have taken a look at it.

The handset has been announced last fall, and this hasn’t been the best timing, as both HTC Kaiser and Toshiba G900 were already present on the market, so E-TEN’s phone engaged in the race with a delay of a few months, and it had to bring about something huge in order to increase the sales. But unfortunately it didn’t bring about even some small features, with a bit of malice I could say that it’s just one of the many gloofishes, which now has a keyboard.

The sample device, provided by SpeedShop, came in the usual mid-sized box. The accessories were also the well-known ones: charger, miniUSB cable, stereo headset, leather case.

Exterior

I always liked the exterior of the gloofish series’ members’, as the silvery plastic and the brushed metal frame surrounding the display have an elegant, modern effect. The concept is the same at M800 too, but the manufacturer tried to give a “pearl” effect for the plastic parts, but the result is not exactly what they expected I think. The handset gives the impression of cheap, one of a dozen Chinese product – furthermore someone had some rough play with the one I had been testing, as the painting came off in some parts, thus further strengthening the previously mentioned negative effect.

Although the phone has no great differences compared to X800, besides the QWERTY keyboard, it’s still much larger. It weighs 178 grams, which falls quite far from the compact category – even though X600 is a nice little piece of hardware – and even its physical size is large, 57.8 x 113.8 x 18.4 mm, which would fall more like in the “brick-size” category. So M800 is not small, it’s uncomfortable to have it in our pocket.

The secondary camera is in the top left corner of the front cover, on the right side of it we can see the phone’s speaker and the usual label. The display has a diagonal of 2.8”, VGA resolution and there is a brushed metal frame surrounding it, which has two status LEDs in its top corners. In the lower part we can see the greatest horror, the nightmare of all users, the touch-sensitive navigation keypad. To further spice up this already flavored meal of pain, the Taiwanese designers also added a small (read: hard to use) joystick. There are 4-4 keys around this, which are small, close to each other, get pressed easily when the phone is in our pocket, and it’s unusable for men’s hand anyway. I could only use the phone after disabling a part of these keys, but unfortunately this can’t be done to the dial/reject call keys, so the little glofiish initiated random calls to the contacts at the beginning of my contact list. It was a real experience.

The back cover is puritan, the designers tried to enhance it with the camera, but this was unsuccessful. There is a large black frame around the 2 MP autofocus camera, to the right we can see the LED flash, the mirror for making self-portraits and the handsfree speaker. On the bottom there is an engraved Windows Mobile logo.

The top part of the gadget has all the colors of the rainbow, in the topmost part there is the previously mentioned pearl-like grey plastic, under that there is a metallic, golden-colored stripe, in the middle we can see a soft, black plastic part with a stripe that is intended to be decorative and in the bottom part there is the terrible grey color again. Otherwise this part is empty, as the power button, the camera’s exposure button and a glofiish label are on the right side.

The stylus’ holder, the miniUSB port, the covered microSD slot, the microphone and the dent used for taking off the back are all on the bottom. On the left there is the 2.5 mm jack output, the reset gap, the Dictaphone’s hotkey and the volume control buttons.

Pushing the upper part to the right we get to see the 37-key QWERTY keyboard with a backlight. This may be the only part of the device that is completely all right, the keys are of an appropriate size, it’s all easy to use. Turning the phone over we can see that the area beyond the display is of gold/copper-colored metal, which matched the grey like… well, I can’t really think of anything funny here, so I’ll just say it looks really dumb.

Hirdetés

Hardware, operating system

The handset’s operating system is Windows Mobile 6 Professional. The sample device had the latest ROM, so I can’t blame the weak performance of the system on this. The CPU is a 500 MHz Samsung SC32442 and there is 256 MB ROM and 64 MB RAM in the box, the typical E-TEN combo. There are some issues with speed, screen changes are slow and there is a considerable amount of waiting time when launching programs. There is only 18 MB of user memory for running programs and 142 MB for storing data, this latter one can be expanded with a microSD card.

We have measured the handset’s speed with Anton Tomow’s Pocket PC Mark again and with our latest favorite, VsBenchmark 2007, that can be freely downloaded. Here are the results:

Marks from Pocket PC Mark for the CPU test were just as expected and we have an exceptionally good result at the memory test. The file system is the usual, but the graphical test result is just disastrous, so it turns out again, that this Samsung processor is not really good to use with VGA displays. It was quite obvious to compare the results of this virtual spaghetti with the ones of X650, and it’s interesting that M800 had a poorer performance, even if the difference is not significant.

Software, phone calls

I won’t be talking much about the software part, as M800 has the usual software pack, specific of the glofiish series. On the Today screen we can see the SPB Mobile Shell, on the usual orange background, that gives the phone a quick dial and a weather forecast surface for example. Besides the lots of extra software the task manager is also worth to mention, as it makes the X button really close (end, stop, quit) running applications.

I had the usual E-TEN problem during phone calls, which means that after accepting an incoming call, the microphone turns on only with a delay of about two seconds, until than only I can hear the one I’m talking to, hear or she can listen to the sounds of silence. Sound quality was still okay, there was no problem with switching between UMTS/GMS networks either.

The phone uses Outlook as a phonebook, we can create new entries until there is enough free internal memory, so we can store up to many tens of thousands of names, and there is no lack of extra fields either. The same programs handles messaging too, it has an email client that supports authenticated IMAP servers and attached files. Amongst E-TEN software there is a Call Filter, a profile switcher (Scenarios) and a small application that can set music files as ringtones.

Multimedia, GPS

The camera has a resolution of 2 megapixels, autofocus and a LED flash to help it function in poor lighting conditions. The camera’s software is the on in every E-TEN, it starts up even slower than usual, it takes about 5-6 seconds, which is something I just can’t understand and it’s also quite annoying. Unfortunately the user interface didn’t change, it still has its features hard to understand, there are silly looking icons that have to be pressed to change the resolution for example (pictured below). Exposure is also slow; we have to keep the phone motionless for a few seconds after pressing the button if we don’t want to get blurry pictures. There aren’t many functions: self-timer, effects, white balance and that’s it. The pictures (max. 1600 x 1200 pixels large) are of medium quality.

M800 is no master of multimedia content, as we can only use Media Player for music playback. Under the Multimedia menu we find a picture viewer, a contact card manager and the software of the FM radio. Sound is of medium quality, both when using a headset and through the speaker. TCPMP played back PC-optimized DivX movies, even though it was a bit choppy.

The built-in SiRF-Star III GPS receiver has 20 channels and TMC support. There were no problems during its usage, positioning was fast and I also found signal strength as being fairly good.

Data transfer, other, summary

The GSM module is quad-banded (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), so we can use M800 for making phone calls in any corner of the world. We can use HSDPA for data transfer, or we can fall back to UMTS, EDGE or GPRS in lack of network coverage. The built-in WiFi supports 802.11b/g standards, the 2.0 Bluetooth supports A2DP – all of these functioned flawlessly.

The battery has a capacity of 1530 mAh. The hi-res display made heavy use of it, so the device was functional for maximum two days with one charge, at normal usage, but one should put it on the charger daily, just to be sure.

Summary: E-TEN glofiish M800 didn’t convince me. No matter its plain design, its price is about 515 EUR, which is extremely much in my opinion, although it’s a fact that it’s still cheaper than similar devices of the same category. There are no problems with it in terms of data transfer possibilities and software, but I think that these touchkeys make the phone almost unusable and this is a reason for not loving it. Probably I’m not alone with this opinion, as meanwhile the manufacturer has released M810 with normal keys, which has the problem of costing almost 635 EUR. So my opinion didn’t change: if someone would like a QWERTY palm device with lots of features, than he or she should choose Toshiba G900, as that’s the best buy.

Bocha

Translated by Szaszati

The sample device has been provided by www.speedshop.hu, thanks. To access the shop please click here .

Specifications

E-TEN glofiish M800
	Technology	GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900 MHz + UMTS, HSDPA
	Operating system	Windows Mobile 6 Professional
	Size	57.8 x 113.8 x 18.4 mm
	Weight	178 grams
	CPU	500 MHz Samsung SC34224
	ROM/RAM	256 / 64 MB (142 / 18 MB free to use)
	Display	2.8” diagonal, 480 x 640 pixel resolution, 16 bit color depth touchscreen
	Expandability	microSD
	WiFi	802.11b/g standards
	Infra/Bluetooth	none / 2.0 (A2DP too)
	GPS receiver	20 channel SiRF Star III
	Audio	2.5 mm jack output, microphone, mono speaker
	Camera	2 megapixels, CMOS with autofocus, flash
	Battery	1530 mAh changeable Li-Ion
	Other	Voice commands, TMC support