E-TEN M810 - the Rolls Royce of PDA devices

Foreword, box

I think I have never in my life have been so happy to give back a reviewed phone than I was in the case of E-TEN M800. I have to admit that I have been overly happy to get rid of that useless horror. Because of that handset I have also been disappointed about the manufacturer too, as its devices practically differ only in their names lately; besides that they are almost the same, at least in hardware. Fortunately not even a month had to pass, and thanks to SpeedShop, I have received the newest handset, called M810. It will be much harder to give this back…

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Before talking about the phone, let’s see what kind of gadgets we had from E-TEN recently. The first members of the glofiish series were the successful X500 and M700, the first has been followed by X500+ with a VGA display, while the latter one has been the predecessor of the previously mentioned E-TEN M800. The top phone is X800, which also has a high-resolution display, which is accompanied by two mid-range phones (X600 és X650). So the family is a populous one, but there are some static features. One of these is the Samsung SC32442 CPU, as all of the phones have this, only the clock frequency is what changes between 400 and 500 MHz – depending on the phone’s category (mid-range or high-end).The 64 MB RAM, however, is permanent, and this is also the greatest problem of the series. Besides the lots of pre-installed software we can also define the VGA display as a specific feature of E-TEN handsets, as although they’re not the only ones to have such a screen, but the 2.8” has been characteristic only of them for a while. Unfortunately the previously mentioned Samsung CPU is no friend of these kinds of displays; VGA resolution E-TEN devices can be really slow sometimes. So there would be room for improvements.

The sample device came in the usual, mid-sized box, which had a label on top of it that is quite unique for a Pocket PC: this text encourages the user to download Java games… to tell the truth I don’t really think that a device that costs €650 EUR should be sold with this slogan. The list of accessories is quite familiar, it includes a charger, a miniUSB cable, a headset, a leather case and the inevitable CDs.

Hirdetés

Design

M810 is theoretically the upgraded edition of M800, but the name is not M800+ probably because not just the internal features improve: the handset has a completely new case, unusual of E-TEN. The low-quality plastic cover of the predecessor had to be changed, but the designers didn’t want to reach a concession: the newcomer has a case of such a quality that we can rarely see, and that’s no exaggeration. If I’d want to compare it with cars, I’d say that this new glofiish is the Rolls Royce of Pocket PCs: it’s elegant, it’s clean, it’s high-quality, even taking it in my hands makes me happy. Of course quality has its price, as the device has a weight of almost 180 grams, so keeping it in jeans pocket might turn out to be uncomfortable.

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Unfortunately these pictures can’t illustrate how beautiful the phone is. The front is made of a blueish, shiny plastic, although it looks as if it had been made of metal. On top, near the secondary camera, we can see the phone’s speaker, which also serves as a status LED. It’s unfortunately not in the center, but that’s not such a big problem. Below this we can see the 2.8” QVGA touchscreen. No, it’s no misspelling; M810 doesn’t have a VGA resolution display, which has been a great decision in my opinion. Although picture quality is indeed beautiful at 640 x 480 resolution, but the high resolution highly decreases uptime and also stresses the Samsung CPU a lot. QVGA resolution, on the other, doesn’t hurt our eyes at 2.8”, so on the whole I can say that it has been a wise decision to change the screen to a lower resolution one.

On the front we can find the most important keys, like the 5-way d-pad, the call handling buttons and the two soft keys. These two are flatter than the call handlers, so there’s no problem accepting calls “blindly”, we won’t miss the key. The d-pad is not only good looking, but it also has a proper size, so it’s easy top use.

The back cover is made of a soft, silky plastic; E-TEN likes to use this material a lot, and there’s no problem with that as it provides a pleasant grip. On top, near the handsfree speaker we can see the 2 MP fix focus camera, the LED flash and the mirror used for taking self-portraits. The design is all right in these parts too.

There is nothing on top of the device. In the top left corner we can see the hook for fastening the wristband; the volume control keys are on the left, along with the sound recorders hotkey and the microSD slot, which is not covered.

On the bottom, near the microphone, we can see the miniUSB connector, which is also the headset output, as there is no 2.5 mm jack connector on the phone, which is a really sad thing. On the right we can find the camera’s exposure button, the reset gap and the power button.

When sliding the phone open we can observe the 35-key QWERTY keyboard. It looks like Motorola RAZR’s keypad; it’s made of brushed metal and has a blue backlight. The keys have a good size, and there pressure point is okay too, so they are pretty easy to use.

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The engine

The operating system is Windows Mobile 6 Professional. Even though M810 has a QVGA display, it’s still equipped with a 500 MHz CPU: this is the first device to have this combination, and, respectively, it’s quite fast. The ROM has a size of 256 MB, while RAM unfortunately is still 64 MB large, which will turn out not to be enough for many users. With the pre-installed software, we have 124 MB of storage space and 28.5 MB of program memory free after a restart. After deleting these software these values change to 147 and 31.5 MB, the latter still not being enough.

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We have yet again measured the device’s speed and performance with Anton Tomow’s Pocket PC Mark and with our new favorite, VirtualSpagetti Benchmark.

After running the tests we got some quite interesting results. Pocket PC Mark’s CPU test had slightly better results than in the case of M800, while the graphics test was five times better. VsBenchmark’s similar test, however, had 15% weaker results, while other parts had better (Others, Games) or worse results (JPEG, Sound). The Sound test had incredibly bad results, which also made the overall result to decrease. Frankly I don’t know what to think based on these scores; I can only hope that the next ROM will fix these issues. I think that it’s still faster than it’s predecessor, which is no wonder; this has to be this way, thanks to the QVGA display.

Software, phone calls, data transfer

If it’s an E-TEN, than it has lots of pre-installed apps: we could have got used to this. Unfortunately it’s quite hard to write about such a great number of software, so I’ll just mention the new things, as M810 has the usual suite of E-TEN software.

One of the new apps is the one called Skype Receiver Switch, which can be found in the Phone menu. This takes us to one of the tabs in Sounds & Notifications settings. Here we can set up sounds to be played back on the front speaker after launching Skype.

In the settings we can also find a thing called Headset volume limiter. I think its name talks for itself.

The handset has a quad-banded GSM module (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), while for data transfer we can even use HSDPA. WiFi supports 802.11b/g standards; Bluetooth 2.0 supports the stereo profile (A2DP), which can kind of compensate us for the lack of the standard jack output. Sound quality has been fairly good during phone calls, while changing between GSM/UMTS networks was no problem for M810.

The Wireless Manager has also been updated, and it finally doesn’t look like as if had been drawn by a kindergartner child – by the way it would be time to change the menu icons too. The contact list and messaging software is still Outlook, which has no problems in terms of functionality. Thanks to the pre-installed SPB Mobile Shell, we can find a speed dial interface on the Today screen, but we can also use voice dialing if we want to.

Multimedia, GPS

The camera is a 2 megapixel one with fixed focus; it has macro mode, which can be activated from the software. It’s a great thing that the camera’s software is a completely new one; at last we have to do with a usable interface. I am happy, because I didn’t really like the old one, it looked like the nightmare of a mad painter. In this new software we can tamper with white balance, JPEG compression, there is a Lens menu with two possible settings (Internal and External), there is a self timer, image sequencer (up to 9 images), exposure correction (+/- 2 EV) and manual brightness and contrast setup. It’s nice that macro mode is called Flower mode.

Unfortunately the software has its downsides too, and it has a very serious one. The automatism is no friend (to say the least) of white balance, as it recognizes bright sunlight as fluorescent lighting, which results in photos with a blueish shade, like the first one below. If we set daylight mode manually, then the situation improves a bit, but we’ll still get pictures with interesting colors; I can’t even really decide that which title would describe better the atmosphere of the golden pictures better: “Sandstorm in the Namibian desert” or “Hungary, the place where angels live”. Picture quality is worthless anyway; noise filtering is so powerful that all details are lost, and the resulting files are still around 1.5 MB in size, which is unjustified.

The media player application is Windows Media Player, I had written about its deficiencies many times, so I won’t do it again. This gap can be filled in easily, however, by installing MortPlayer, so this is no problem, but the fact that there is no standard jack output, so we can only use the supplied headset. This, however, is a Sennheiser MX400 (or at least it looks like one), equipped with a microphone and a record button, and it has superb sound quality. The built-in handsfree also has a surprisingly good quality, which is indeed great. If we add the built-in FM tuner, then we can say that M810 is the best musical gloffish so far.

The built-in GPS receiver is a SiRF-Star III, which includes SiRF InstantFix technology. This is used to provide faster positioning. I have tried navigation with iGO 2006 SE, and I had no problems.

Other, summary

The battery has a capacity of 1530 mAh. Thanks to the QVGA display, the handset has quite a long uptime with one charge; with a normal use it stayed online for 2 days, while if it is heavily used it has to be charged daily.

Summary: M810 is a beautiful, well assembled, smart machine. Its new features provide us an insight to the company’s plans for the future; the camera’s new software is extremely welcome, although there is much more left to improve. Still, the lack of a jack output is no reason to be joyful; I can only hope that this has been only a slip-up from E-TEN. It would be high time, however, to forget the 64 MB RAM, even more because upgrading it wouldn’t mean higher production costs. There are, however, two things because of which there is still text here, instead of a recommended award. The first is the phone’s gross price, which is currently around €650 EUR, while the second is HTC Touch Diamond, which will be launched next month. No matter how good M810 is, it’s extremely expensive for such a price, and, even more, HTC’s wonder machine can be already pre-ordered for 30 EUR less. This makes the new glofiish get only a Cool product award, but we still like it!

E-TEN glofiish M810

Bocha

Translated by Szaszati

The phone has been provided by Speedshop www.speedshop.hu, thanks. Please click here to access the shop.

Specifications

E-TEN glofiish M810
	Technology	GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900 MHz + UMTS, HSDPA
	Operating system	Windows Mobile 6 Professional
	Size	109.5 x 59 x 17.5 mm
	Weight	179 grams
	CPU	500 MHz Samsung SC34224
	ROM/RAM	256 / 64 MB (142 / 18 MB free to use)
	Display	2.8” diagonal, 240 x 320 pixels 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	miniUSB audio output, microphone, mono speaker
	Camera	2 megapixels, fixed focus, flash, macro mode
	Battery	1530 mAh changeable Li-Ion
	Other	Voice commands, TMC support, SiRF InstantFix