Thinking of buying a new phone…
Posted by Sayamindu 2 years, 1 month ago
My old Motorola E398 phone is dead, and I’m thinking of buying a new GSM phone. The candidates right now are the Motorola A1200 (MotoMING) and the Motorola A780 (both Linux based). Probably I’ll end up buying the Motorola A780, since it has got support for EDGE (though I completely fail to understand why the Motorola A1200, which is newer than the A780 does not support EDGE). I’ll try to swap the 256 MB memory card which comes with the A780 for a higher capacity card (1 GB or 512 MB) - and as for the rest of the features of the A1200 which are not present in the A780 (FM Radio, 2 megapixel camera, business card scanner, support for the Bluetooth A2DP and AVRCP profiles, etc), I’m simply not interested. One more advantage of the A780 is that it has got a physical keypad, while the A1200 is entirely touchpad/stylus based. Knowing myself and my phone usage pattern, the keypad is going to be a major screensaver :-).
After doing some Googling, it also turns out that most of the directories in the A1200 is locked using SELinux, (yes - right, you have got SELinux on a phone) while the A780 is comparatively less restrictive (you can telnet into both the phones, and you also have a 3rd party terminal emulator program which runs natively on the A780). Someone also managed to get Debian GNU/Linux to run on the phone, and there is also an unofficial SDK which lets you develop native apps for the phone (the official Motorola recommendation is to go the J2ME way).
I’m looking for some feedback from people who have actually used the A780 - if you have any issues with the phone please do let me know.
I have a A780. The battery life isn’t that great. If u dont mind recharging the Phone daily -> its the Phone for u.
There is no better phone pda in Motorola like A1200 (ming). Just bought a week ago and I am addicted to its features, GREAT LOOK, email, browsing, Coolest FM, 2MP Cam, lots of Java3D games, etc etc. And EDGE??? LOL??? I will laugh ROTFL if any GPRS carrier tells me that they have launched EDGE yet. :)) so chill-out and get this one. Till EDGE starts in India after 2/3 years effectively. Let these carriers first finish the basic network problems in major cities and prime locations at least.
the a1200 I got in july 2007 which was for hongkong, I believe, has edge. There are also some instructions on motorolafans for enabling it using RadioComm