Menu system, usability, software
The standby screen has four icons that can be changed as we want to. These are assigned to the four directions of the d-pad, so we can easily launch our favorite applications. There is a quicklaunch menu with a list, this pops up when pressing the left softkey. The one for accessing the menu is on the opposite side, the design is tailored to the circle display and the nine icons are placed according to this. We can change between them with the horizontal direction keys, the animation looks good, but it’s quite slow, so if we keep pressing the direction keys fast, we will keep jumping between the menu points without any transition. The menu items are the following: contacts, call log, camera, settings, web, calendar, office tools, multimedia, messaging. We won’t see battery and signal level in the main menu, but it appears on the standby screen and on the submenus. Speed is not very impressive, the software tends to slow down for no apparent reason, but it’s usually usable.
We have the usual Motorola applications, along with all the pros and cons. As for the negative aspects: there is no stopwatch or timer, while on the positive side of the balance we can mention the nice calendar where we can store lots of kinds of events. This doesn’t have a circle shape, but it’s a rectangle, the same we can see on the landscape displays of the E series phones – the 480 pixel circle has a 320 x 240 pixel large area in the middle, so Aura is theoretically compatible with all applications designed for “normal” screens. Most applications are under the office tools menu, here we can access the calendar, which has a dedicated menu as well, the file manager, the alarm clock, the world clock, the calculator, the notepad, synchronization, the download manager, the call services and the to-do list.
There are two themes, a light and a dark one, both look great. The manufacturer has supplied quite a lot of wallpapers, they are all spectacular, I just had to keep changing them. The clock, that is shown when the flip is closed, is also beautiful, there are six of them and all of them are a kind of visual orgasm. There is, for example a digital one, which changes it color on every closing of the flip, which is not a big deal on its own, but the software developers did a great job choosing the colors, so looking at the display of Aura is like looking at a beautiful watch.
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
