Introduction, packaging, accessories
Motorola has recently decided, that in spite of their difficult situation – or maybe for turning things to the better – they will launch a luxury phone. The first pictures and information about the gadget called Aura have appeared a couple of months ago on the web, and now, thanks to XXL GSM, we have also received one of these devices that cost nearly 1750 euros. The phone stayed only for two days at me, which, considering its price and the risk factor, might as well be a fortunate thing.
It is not that interesting that a phone costs this much, but to tell the truth this is a price segment that hasn’t been covered before. Nokia’s most expensive handsets cost about 700-1000 euros, Vertus have a starting price of 2500 EUR, so we could say that Motorola Aura fills a huge gap on the market, haha. The truth is that I think it is highly overpriced, but not how like usually luxury phones are. It’s okay that if we consider the handset’s quality, the materials used and the design than we get no worse price/value ratio than any other handset’s in a similar price range. But who buys a Morola for so much? If a non-professional, rich person looks at Aura, he might say that we have a Motorola for 350-500 euros, so Aura won’t smell like money, but a Vertu does. And those who could afford Aura can probably spend the double for a Vertu, which is a phone with much less features, but it shows how rich we are. Yeah, that’s why people usually buy a luxury phone for.
One thing that made me think less of Aura’s quality is that the leather case that comes with it is extremely smelly. I could say that it freaking stinks, it’s incredible what kind of foul smell can come from such a small case. The day when I received the phone I’ve put it on a desk in the hall, along with its case, it stayed there for about two hours when my girlfriend came home and her first question was what’s this smell? To tell the truth I’ve also felt something strange, although I am not that good at detecting smells, so we have decided that the new Sony Ericsson Bluetooth watch can be the one responsible and we’ve taken out the watch that night. Before going to bed we’ve again looked at each other and our face clearly showed that we still feel the smell. The case has been lying a couple of meters away, but it still has been smelly enough to make us spend the night in an uncomfortable, stale, stuffy place. The second night the phone stayed in the kitchen, so we observed the foul smell of the case only when drinking our morning coffee, and by the end of the test period the phone has also taken over the same bad smell…
The handset came in a box that astonished even us, experienced journalists. It’s a wooden case, covered in leather on the top and bottom, stuffed with plush on the inside and it even has nice little crates everywhere that close magnetically. The accessories are placed in these: the charger, the data cable, the microUSB-minUSB converter, the leather case, the stereo headset and the wipping tissue. It’s interesting that the headset is a completely standard musical Motorola one, which can be familiar from the E series.
Anyway, we can say that the packaging gave a new meaning for “exclusivity”, or at least we didn’t see such a thing before.
Exterior
R1 is evidently the successor of the plastic V70 that had a flip, which has been announced back in 2002. Still, Aura is positioned a couple of ranks higher, and this can be seen on the high-quality materials and the special (or at least so-called special) design, besides the price tag of course. It’s a fact that the case is made of stainless steel and it also seems sure that the display is protected by a 62 carat sapphire glass from physical damage. It seems less probable that the ribbing on the front and the back are created in a chemical process that takes two weeks, the metal is etched, polished and then covered with a protective layer. As for me I don’t care at all if such a ribbing is created in two minutes or two weeks if the result is the same… There is some other marketing bullshit regarding the flip’s mechanism as well, I’ll mention this immediately, but first let’s see some raw data: the phone weighs 141 grams, and it’s size is 969.9 x 47.6 x 18.6 mm, so we have a rather small and high-quality phone.
The display’s most prominent and most important element is the TFT panel, which is special for a couple of reasons. This is the world’s first circle-shaped display in a mobile phone, which is quite a thing – yes, it is a real circle, not a square display that has a circle-shaped piece of plastic on it. A slightly convex sapphire glass protects the display, which is not bad either, as not even Nokia 8800 Sapphire Arte has such a thing, as on this only the button is made of sapphire. Of course the whole thing is not that special as watch around 175 euros has similar qualities, but it is still a new thing in the mobile industry. Last, but not least, the display’s physical parameters are also astonishing: it has a diagonal of 1.55” and the pixel diagonal is 480 pixels. I didn’t find any factory information about this, but I am sure that Aura has the smallest pixel of all phones in Europe. Image quality is beautiful, even iPhone’s screen can look lame compared to this, the pictures are almost alive on the not very large display, we can’t find any visible pixels or edges, not even with a microscope. Besides this color fidelity is also remarkable. There is nothing else interesting on the front, a Motorola logo, which can light up, is placed on the bottom – it’s blue when Bluetooth is turned on (surprising color, isn’t it?).
The back is more interesting, as the camera is placed behind a glass plate on the top, along with three cogwheels, which nicely rotate when the flip is opened up. Here comes one of Motorola’s greatest marketing gibberish: Aura is told to be assembled of 700 parts, 200 of which (including 130 ball bearings) are used for making the flip move smoothly. Even the numbers are interesting, as no manufacturer has disclosed similar information, so it’s really hard to judge if these 700 parts are good or bad for me and I can’t really believe the 130 ball bearings either, as the flip functions just like on any other phones. We can feel that it’s opened by springs, not by the cogwheels, as it moves by itself after a certain position – here we can hear a loud click and the wheels jump, it looks really strange… I would like to note that we can open the flip in any direction, but we can close it only the same way, so it won’t do a 360 rotation like V70’s plastic front.
The sides have nothing special. The microUSB connector is on top, lacking all kinds of cover or protection. There is nothing noteworthy on the bottom, we can see two buttons on the sides used for taking off the back and the volume control keys are on the left.
The keyboard appears as we open up the flip and the on-screen picture is turned upside down as well. We can’t do much with the phone when it’s closed, only the clock is display, but let’s add: it looks very cool. Getting back to the keyboard: I haven’t seen anything worse than this one; the keypad has such a strange layout that it seriously affects usability. The design isn’t perfect either, button labels remind me of the Comic Sans font and it’s also weird that button 5’s label is embossed, which makes it look as if there would be a decal on it that is about to come off. Putting these aside we only have to do something with usability. The first problem is the extremely small d-pad, which is simply not designed for men’s hands. The second one is that we won’t access submenus with the top left softkey (that has a proper size), but with the OK button, which is practically impossible to press without also pressing one of its neighbors. The same is true for the clear key, if we want to delete a character when writing an SMS we will surely press the top softkey or the call end key and the phone will ask if we really want to cancel the message. The last problem is with the numeric keys: if we press one of them, it might happen that characters from another key will also appear on-screen – and it won’t happen only if we really press another key accidentally. So, on the whole, the keyboard is terrible.
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.
Data communication and phone calls
The contact list gave me a bit of a hard time, as due to the lots of phones I use I store my phonebook of about 150 names on the SIM card. Well, someone has already tried this Aura before me, so the contact list already had almost 200 names, which would have been no problem. I would have liked to make the phone display only SIM contacts, but I didn’t manage to do this, instead Aura copied as many contacts from its internal memory to my card as it could. Result: long minutes of manual deleting from my card. The phonebook can store 1000 contacts, I didn’t find any extra fields, but we can store as many numbers as we want, the problem is that all fields are simply called number. This means that the dear user has to remember which phone number is the office number, which is the personal and so on.
Internal memory size is 2 GB, there is no expandability. Multimedia contents (music, pictures and videos) and emails are stored here; the phone has an email client which is compatible with POP3 and IMAP4. We can accept multimedia messages as well, these are also stored on the large memory, but the fate of SMS messages is doubtful, at least I didn’t find any information about how many of these can be stored. In the call log we can view received/missed/dialed calls separately or on the same list, the phone stores the last 30 of each of these.
Aura is no data communication top model, as although it has a quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) GSM module, it features no 3G, thus we can say goodbye to fast data transfer, we need to stick to GPRS or EDGE. The web browser can be familiar from other Motorolas, the little circle display offers no great browsing experience, so I didn’t really use this. There is no WiFi, but we have Bluetooth 2.0 with stereo sound support. I have to say that the phone’s sound quality is indeed great: I have heard the other person’s voice crystal clear, who have also told the same thing.
Multimedia
The camera has a resolution of 2 megapixels and fix focus, the highest available resolution for pictures is 1600 x 1200 pixels, while this value is 176 x 144 pixels for videos. There aren’t many settings available, we can only set resolution and quality, there isn’t even white balance setup, although even the cheapest Nokia phones have such a feature. There are two “bonuses”: self-timer and image sequences.
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Image quality is average. Color fidelity is rather good, noise level is medium, but the edges of the pictures are rather blurred. Still, taking pictures is a great experience, the high-resolution circle display is a great viewfinder, we might have the feeling of looking at the world through a small hole. Of course it has the downside that we can only see the center circle part of the 4:3 ratio pictures, so we don’t see exactly what we are taking a picture of – at least the edges.
The music player is not bad, we can filter tracks by all kinds of ID3 tags, it can run in the background, it displays album covers, it has bass boosting and an equalizer. The first lets us set bass power on a scale of seven, while the second has preset schemes to choose from. The headset – as I have already mentioned – can be familiar from the E series, it’s a black one and we can have no complaints about sound quality, it’s good, but Aura has nothing to be ashamed of through the handsfree speaker either, as that’s rather loud and clear too.
Battery, summary
The battery is an 810 mAh piece, but due to the short testing period I can’t tell you any reliable information about how long can it keep the phone online It’s sure that it performs good: when I received the phone the charge meter has been at level three, I didn’t charge the phone, but it had no problem staying online for two days, although I have used it quite a lot. The meter has dropped back to one, but Aura still didn’t warn me of a low battery level – based on this I might say that with an average use it can go for at least 3-4 days with a charge, which is really great.
Summary: it’s always hard to judge a luxury product objectively. If we only look at what kind of phone Aura is, then the big picture is quite positive: the materials used and the assembly quality are both exceptionally good, the design is unique, and I can only say the best things about the circle display’s quality – and sound quality is just a bonus. At the same time its leather case smells awful (ok, this might have been a unique case), its horrible keypad makes typing nearly impossible, the software is sometimes slow and anyway: we have to pay a smaller fortune to get it. In this category price doesn’t really matter, as there is not much difference between insanely expensive and insanely expensive, the main point is to get an exclusive quality product. Aura is one of these, so there’s no problem giving it a cool product award. If I would have to choose between a Vertu and this, I would surely go for the Motorola.
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| Motorola R1 Aura |
Bocha
Translated by Szaszati
Motorola Aura has been provided by XXL GSM. The handset can be purchased at:
Budapest VI. Jókai tér 6.
Budapest VI. Teréz körút 18.
On-line at www.xxlgsm.hu.
Specifications
| Motorola R1 Aura | ||
 | General | |
| Technology | GSM | |
| Size | 96.9 x 47.6 x 18.6 mm | |
| Weight | 141 grams | |
| Available colors | Silver | |
| Display | ||
| Display diagonal | 1.55“ | |
| Display diagonal | 480 pixels - circle shape | |
| Display type | TFT | |
| Number of colors | 16 million | |
| Memory | ||
| Phonebook capacity | 1000 | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | ? / 300 KB | |
| Internal memory | 2048 MB | |
| Memory expandability | not expandable | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | 850/900/1800/1900 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 12 | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | none / none | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | none / 2.0 | |
| WiFi | none | |
| USB | 2.0 (microUSB) | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | none / present | |
| GPS receiver | none | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | none | |
| Vibra function | present | |
| Built-in handsfree | present | |
| Voice dialing / voice commands | none / none | |
| Sound recorder | present | |
| Alarm clock | present, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | present | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | Unix-based Motorola | |
| WAP / HTML browser | 2.0 / xHTML | |
| E-mail client | none | |
| Java | present, MIDP 2.0 | |
| Games | present | |
| Currency converter | present | |
| Extra software | - | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 2 megapixels, fix focus | |
| Secondary camera | none | |
| Video recording | present (176 x 144 pixels at most) | |
| Music player | present | |
| Music player can run in background | yes | |
| FM radio | none | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | 810 mAh Li-Ion | |
| Standby time | 225 hours | |
| Talk time | 245 minutes | |
| Other | ||
| stainless steel case, circle-shaped display | ||
