I’ve been using the Motorola A835 mobile phone for a little over 3 months now and overall its been a good buy. I’m using the 3G service from Three Australia. Following is my personal review of the handset.
Things I like about the Motorola A835:
1. The battery lasts long – almost 2 days of normal usage after a full-recharge.
2. The sound quality is great. The in-built speakers are awesome! The quality of MP3 playback is great.
3. Accessibility and usability are well designed. The user interface (UI) is easy-to-use.
4. Internet access on the phone is quick. Support for USB and Bluetooth connectivity is also good.
5. The ability to deploy mobile applications is smooth. In fact, my friend Ajay built a small game (in J2ME) which we tried on the phone. Although it took him some time to figure out the whole process.
Things I don’t like about the Motorola A835:
1. The phone is a bit bulky.
2. The software application supplied with the handset to manage the multimedia files on the phone is not user-friendly. Multiple-selection of files on the phone is not possible and each file has to be transfered or deleted individually, which is quite frustrating. (Update 11/06: the multiple-selection issue seems to have been fixed in the software update I downloaded and installed yesterday). The software application hung-up a couple of times. Transferring a 4-5 MB MP3 file takes around 5-10 minutes.
3. Quality of the digital still camera is not quite good (specially under limited lighting). The quality of the video camera is poor. BTW, the videos are MP4 encoded so the appropriate codec must be installed for PC playback.
Overall, I would rate the phone a 7/10.