Eten M800 Review

Introduction:

Eten Glofiish M800 is the most advanced model of the manufacturer. It is X800’s ‘big brother’, upgrading it with a side-sliding QWERTY keyboard, just as the M700 and X500. Combine this with excellent specifications, and there is nothing left to be desired – the M800 sounds as if a dream came true.

As all other Etens, in the box you will find everything you need:

• Eten M800
• Battery
• Screen protector
• Charger
• Stereo handsfree
• Leather pouch
• USB cable
• Extra stylus
• Quick Start Guide
• Getting Started CD

Design:

The look of the M800 reminds us of the rest of the Etens – it isn’t ugly, but you wouldn’t call it pretty either. It is definitely a professionally looking device and unlike the HTC TyTN II won’t appeal to other audiences, besides the business class. The only element that stands out of the design language is the back of the upper slider; a bronze colored line encircles the phone, giving us a hint, what to expect. Slide it open and the back has the same extravagant color, and so do the alternative characters of the keyboard. It doesn’t really make sense, but we like it, and also think it will be cool to see the feature in some upcoming phones with consumer-targeted design, such as the M810 or V900.



You can compare the Eten M800 to many other phones, using PhoneArena's Visual Size Compare tool.

The whole front side reminds of the idea of the phone – it is made for work and not for fun. The titanium-colored plastic nicely combines with the brushed aluminum frame around the display. The latter is situated in the middle of the phone, which leaves little space for the buttons below. In addition, they are capacitive touch sensitive keys (respond to touch of finger but not a stylus) and are not really perfectly responsive so using them may be a problem. An option allows you to add vibration (haptic) and/or sound, to indicate once a key is ‘activated’. Additional problems add the fact that after a few seconds of inactivity, the keys ‘lock’ and one must press the display or the joystick, to ‘unlock’ them. The navigation joystick in the middle, is usable, but is a pain when compared to a good D-pad.


The display is a 2.8” with 65k colors (standard for such phone) and VGA resolution of 480x640 pixels. This is 4x the standard QVGA resolution and results in times better image, with enhanced details. Even the Windows Mobile user interface itself is more defined. The UI on a QVGA compared to a VGA one is the same as Windows XP compared to Vista. The additional resolution helps for more detailed icons and images as a whole. Unfortunately, it is of no use when it comes to visibility outdoors: as most other Pocket PC phones, the M800 has a serious problem in such environments and even when set at maximum brightness, the screen may be hard to read. Another drawback is that the display is concaved and it is hard to press object in its end (such as the X icon or the scroll bar) without the help of a stylus.

The latter is situated in the bottom right corner of the phone. Typically, it is telescopic and retracts when you take it out. Next to it, on the bottom, are the miniUSB and the microSD slot with a hard to remove plastic cover.

On the left are the volume rocker and the voice commands key. They have below-the-average relief and are rather hard to press. Here also are the reset button and the 2.5 mm headset jack. On the right are the power key and the protruding camera shortcut. The first one is absolutely flat, small and you have to press it with the tip of a finger. If you hold the phone with one hand , the slider may do a slight movement when pressing the power, as you exert pressure on the bottom slider in the direction it moves.


Once you really want to open the slider, this happens trouble-free and with no effort at all. The movement is fluid and the spring mechanism is strong. You can release the keyboard with a single finger, no matter which part of the upper slider (left, center or right) is pushed.

The whole surface here has rubber finish applied to it, for more comfortable typing after long usage (wet hands). The buttons press very well, with real movement and significant click, which is excellent tactile feedback. Its only drawback is the greenish backlit, which is usable but looks weird.

On the back is nothing but the camera and the battery cover of course. Strangely, the phone shuts off automatically once the cover is removed (which is an unpleasant job) although the battery is not attached to it. This is probably an additional security.

Interface:

Software-wise, Eten M800 is yet another Windows Mobile 6 Professional phone. In this aspect, it is a 100% copy of the X800. Eten follows the trend and slightly personalizes the interface to be “more user friendly”. In addition to increasing the font size in a few menus (the contacts, messaging), it changes the home screen, utilizing a limited version of SPB software (Mobile Shell).. In the upper part there is a toolbar with four buttons, but two more can be added. Their order can be customized, but we will examine it as preset in the factory.


The first icon indicates the battery remaining, but when selected, a menu appears showing the last twelve applications used. The second one is a shortcut to the World Clocks and Alarms menu, the third one leads to the Weather Forecast and the last one gets us to the Dial Tab, where you can set up to five contacts for speed dial, characterized by name or picture attached.

In addition, you have one more menu for a fast access to the phone’s functions. It is activated by tapping the QuickBar (Home) button and consists of nine shortcuts to: 1)Landscape view; 2)Scenarios, from where you can choose preloaded display brightness levels; 3)Flashlight; 4)Task Manager; 5)SMS; 6)File Explorer; 7)Calculator; 8)Wireless Manager; 9)FM Tuner.

A customized task manager, including good finger touch control, which facilitates termination of running applications, has been added as well.



The М800 has the M-Desk menu preloaded, as the rest of the Eten models. It is activated by double tapping the QuickBar button. This software provides shortcuts to various menus of the phone, divided in four tabs: 1) Phone; 2) PDA; 3) Fun; 4) System.

The rest of the interface is standard for Windows Mobile 6 Professional phones.

PhoneBook:

The phonebook is the standard for the OS: not the best you can find on the market (hint: Symbian S60), but is neat. The number of contacts that can be added is not restricted and depends only on the memory available. When you open the phonebook all contacts are displayed as a list; each field consists of the name and the number, while a letter placed beside them indicates what the type of number it is (w – work; m – mobile, etc.). Pictures are not displayed even if there is one attached to the contact.

The line displayed at the top of the screen is a search field, which initiates a name search on entering a symbol – the more symbols you type, the more accurate the match is – it’s quite useful! Just below it, there are tabs with different letters (divided in groups of three). This way you can arrange the contacts so that the ones beginning with a given letter are displayed. These two search features are quite handy and they make finding a particular contact in the phonebook very easy. However, if you want to find an acquaintance by other field such as “company” for example, you have to use the “Search” application in the programs menu.

The fastest way to search for a name though is through the dialing screen. The virtual keyboard is visualized, together with a small call history list, once the Answer button is pressed.

By pressing the buttons, you will start imputing the digits of a possible number, but at the same time, you will search the phone book as if imputing a text by a predictive text input system. So, to call John you can press 5-6-4-6 and the matching contacts will be visualized in the list.

Things are more complicated when adding a new name: the device offers way too many capabilities, including multiple work and home numbers, but they are not arranged logically. There’s only one field for mobile number – something quite inconvenient as that’s exactly where we wanted to add multiple numbers to. The numerous address, e-mail and other fields confuse you even further – it would have been a lot easier if the most frequently used fields are highlighted in some way. Thus finding them would have been easy, eliminating the need to go through the long list.

Personal photos and ringtones can be assigned to each contact; there’s no restriction on the dimensions of the pictures but they are visualized in very small size even on an incoming call – we think they are useless. You can also add a note to each contact.

Organizer:

There are total of three alarms, which can be accessed through the home screen, by tapping on the clock tab. They can be configured for certain week days , have separate names and sounds. Overall, they are easy to use and do what they are supposed to. We are rather disappointed only that their number is limited to three.

The next tab in this menu is the clock; there is a field called Visiting next to it, which can be used as a World Clock – select another location and the phone starts using its local time. The clock has an option to be displayed on the title bar of all the menus, which is handy.

The calendar, where you can save your appointments, can be found in the Programs menu. Some of the available options are: reminder (PRIOR NOTICE 1/5/10/15/30/45 minutes, 1/2/3/4/5/6 hour/day/week), recurrence (Once, Every (same-day-of-the-week), Day (same-date) of every month, Every (same date-and-month) for every year, sensitivity (normal, personal, private, confidential). It is also possible to add attendees (required or optional) from the contacts, whose e-mail addresses have been added and to whom meeting requests will be sent.


Examining the calendar can be done by day/week/month/year/agenda and you can choose the week starting day and its duration (5,6 or 7 days). The appointments for the day are clearly shown in their time limits, so you can see your free time at a glance. This is one of the new things of WM6 compared to WM5.

You have Tasks menu, where you can add to-do items. For a given Task you can set subject, priority (normal, low, and high), start/due date, reminder (to be notified if it’s due), category (business, holiday, personal, seasonal) and write a note. The assignments can have recurrence (Once, Every (same-day-of-the-week), Day (same-date) of every month, every (same date-date-and-month) for every year and sensitivity (normal, personal, private, confidential). Examining the tasks in a list, you can easily see which of them are finished and which ones are not. The available tasks options are: sort by (status, priority, subject, start date, due date) or filter (all, recent, no categories, active, completed).


The Calculator is simple but its buttons are relatively big and can easily be pressed with a finger. Scientific calculator and unit converter are still missing.

‘Notes’ are simple notes in which you can input text by the keyboard or by hand as an image. They can be synchronized with outlook.

'Search' is an application, exploring all files of the phone. You can specify certain locations (calendar/contacts/excel/messaging/notes/etc), but the best option is All Data which will search through everything in your phone.

File Explorer is the mobile alternative of Windows Explorer seen in computers. It is used to browse the phone memory, including the system folders of the device, which feels like working on a PC.

Messaging:

Different message types are placed in a single menu - SMS, MMS and e-mails. There is nothing unexpected here. If you don’t want to use the hardware QWERTY (open the slider), entering text is done by one of the following touch display methods:

We think that the on-screen keyboard is the fastest and most convenient way to do it, but if you train the other methods, they can also be quite handy!

In addition, the Eten comes with Easy Keyboard, which is another version of the screen keyboard, with large buttons. When used in portrait mode, the keys are not in the standard QWERTY order and if you want to take advantage of the feature, you’ll have to use it in landscape. With M800 though, it is a lot more appropriate, to just use the hardware keyboard.

Connectivity:

Nowadays, talking using the phone is not enough – Windows Mobile phones are pocket computers that are used for Internet, and as GPRS/EDGE are not fast enough, 3G modules are built-in. The sad thing is that like GSM, 3G (UMTS/HSDPA) networks also use various bands on the different continents (2100 MHz for Europe and Asia and 850/1900 MHz for America/Australia, with 1700 MHz prepared for launch by T-Mobile), which means that if the device is optimized for usage in one of the continents group, it won’t work in the other and vice verse. The Eten M800 is quad-band GSM and tri-band (850/1900/2100) UMTS/HSDPA, which allows it to be 3G used in both Europe/Asia and in the U.S., over AT&T’s 3G network. The support of HSDPA (3.6MBps) will allow for even faster than the UMTS data transfer. Just as the TyTN II for example, M800 will be usable in any GSM or UMTS network around the globe, but lacking 1700 MHz, it won’t work as 3G in T-Mobile U.S. future network when it launches.

WiFi and Bluetooth come standard. Bluetooth is mainly used for connecting to other nearby devices, such as accessories (earpieces, car-kits, multimedia devices) and for data transfer (transfer of files to/from another phone/PC). Cable connection can also be used, via the miniUSB port.

Like all other Windows phones, you need to have ActiveSync (Windows XP) or Windows Mobile Device Center (Windows Vista) installed on the computer to connect to it. The program will let you easily synchronize the phone (contacts, emails, and organizer) with Outlook.

With WiFi, you can connect to a wireless LAN network covering your position, use it as an Internet source and view the shared documents (input \\name-of-computer in Internet Explorer and you will see what is shared).

Internet:

Like in every WM6 phone, we have the mobile version of Internet Explorer present here. Unfortunately, the name is the only thing that relates it to the PC version. Large pages are downloaded slowly. That’s where the agony begins: you have three options for visualization, One Column, Fit To Screen and Desktop. The first two deactivate horizontal and allow vertical scrolling and the last one tries to show the page as a PC. It performs OK and does the job. Navigation though, is not comfortable. You cannot zoom out or pan, for easier repositioning (like the iPhone), and if more text is present, be ready for constant scrolling in both directions, since there is no option to fit the text to the screen (as in S60).


Overall, the browser is usable, but uncomfortable and far behind the competition; we avoided using it, unless we really needed to do so. The light upgrade to version 6.1 doesn’t change things much and it’s time Microsoft equipped its business phones with something more competitive. A good example is iPhone’s Safari, the Symbian S60 phones and even some “not smartphones,” by manufacturers such as Sony Ericsson and Samsung.

However, since this is a PocketPC if you don’t like this internet browser, you can install another one. Unfortunately, at the moment there are no descent alternatives available. There are only a few perspective programs, which are expected to come out in the future, and at the moment, only their beta versions are available: Opera Mobile 9.5, SkyFire, and even Microsoft’s own DeepFish.

Camera:

Typically for a smartphone, М800 can’t really be proud of its camera. It has one, just because every phone does nowadays, but does not deliver quality pictures.

Patience is needed, since it takes some time to start the interface. If you want to snap a quick photo, the wait time of 9 to 10 seconds will surely make you nervous and you will most likely fail. On top of that, there is 2 more seconds for focusing and 6 long seconds to store the image, making the camera a slow one.

At first, the interface looks pretty simple. There is a button for switching between camera and camcorder mode and another one to activate the front or the back camera. Beside the Close button, there is a Settings menu as well as information icons indicating the status of the flash, the picture/video size, and memory status.

The Settings menu is designed using big-sized icons. The user is able to pick resolution, white balance, flash mode and decide whether the pictures should be portrait or landscape oriented – these are all standard settings. There is an option to automatically add a date on the picture. There also are a bunch of effects available: Normal, Negative, Gray, Retrospective and Mirror, with the last one being the most unique.

Overall, the interface is quite awkward. At least some of the camera functions could have been associated with regular keys, to speed up the shooting process.

Taking pictures is done by pressing the shortcut on the right. Unfortunately, by doing this, the slider may move, causing additional discomfort.

As in the previous models, even compared to other 2-megapixel cameras, the picture quality is low. Since the photos are blurry when reviewed in their original size, they can only be used if viewed in a smaller size, 800x600 for example (a four times smaller resolution). The colors are realistic, but not saturated enough.



A camcorder is also present, with option to record in QVGA (320x240), QCIF (176x144) and Sub-QCIF (128x96) resolutions in 3gp format. Since the frame rate is very low, the quality of the videos is bad too.

Eten M800 sample video at 320x240 pixels resolution
* Note that due to codecs support, you may not be able to play the file.

Multimedia:

M800 is equipped with the standard mobile version of Windows Media Player. The supported formats are MP3, WMA and WAV. After refreshing the file library, all supported types are found, and they can be added to playlists. This function is not well implemented and organizing them is quite hard. Songs can be viewed by artist, album and genre. .Files on the phone’s memory and the ones on the card are separated.

The buttons (next/previous, play/pause, etc.) are small and inconvenient during both Music and Video playback. When audio files are played, the video window is still displayed, which is a lapse as it only takes up place on your screen. You can have these problems solved by adding new skins for the Media Player or by installing another player.

We recommend converting videos to MPEG4 using the h.263 codec with a bitrate lower than 512 kbps, because otherwise, the video will be choppy when in full-screen mode and there will be skipped frames.

The phone has a built-in FM tuner as well. This is a nice old-school addition to the media player, which helps for music on the go and can also bring you the news in audio format without the need of complicated new advanced technologies like internet streaming.

The interface is very colorful and looks attractive. The buttons are well sized and easy to press. You can easily save your favorite bands and we are happy to see that there is no dumb limit of 10 stations for example and you can save 50 bands for three locations, or total of 150 bands. We are very happy with it and used it with pleasure.

Software:

It's a pity that the RAM is still 64MB and the internal memory is 256, which is the same as the M600+. Internal capacity can be expanded through the microSD card slot placed on the bottom of the phone.

WM for PPC provides unlimited capabilities for installing software. The only restrictions are the memory available and the hardware of the phone. The first problem is solved without any difficulties by getting a memory card as there are microSD cards with capacity of up to several GBs. Every PPC comes with programs that are modified, “pocket” versions of known PC applications. Such programs are the mobile versions of (Microsoft) Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Explorer, Media Player, etc. Many more could be downloaded from third party sources.

There are numerous programs created for this platform, almost as many as for PC. The most popular are the various utilities for personalizing the PPC, multimedia players, file explorers, Instant Messengers, etc.

GPS:

The M800 comes with a built in GPS receiver and the latest generation SIRF III chipset. The SIRF III architecture allows the equivalent of 200,000 correlations, in contrast to the older ones which used sequential search process and allowed a few hundred to a few thousand only. This increases the GPS sensitivity and allows it to work in many indoor environments, through urban canyons, and under dense foliage. SIRF III chipset supports both WAAS in the US or EGNOS systems in Europe for even better accuracy.

Each navigation software offers different interface and functionality, and since E-TEN does not come with anything preloaded, we won’t go into great details about it. The important thing is that the phone's display is adequately large and bright, and offers pleasant map viewing in most conditions, except in bright direct sunlight.

Performance:

M800 is neither the fastest, nor the slowest smartphone on the market. Although it has 500 MHz processor, it is by no means as quick as the iPAQ 614 or even the Touch Cruise. We suggest you clean your RAM memory occasionally, since otherwise the phone gets slower.

In the system performance test, using SPB Benchmark, the M800 is on the bottom of the list, right below the X800. As it can be seen, in the CPU test it performed well, but it didn’t so in the rest of the tests.

We are slightly disappointed by the sound during a conversation, because the outgoing quality and the incoming volume are just average. If it is noisy around you, you may not hear what the other person is saying, however, they sound very realistically and clear, but with a slight background noise. In contrast, your interlocutor will hear you with great strength, but average quality: your voice will sound monotonous, muffled and not very realistic.

The M800’s battery is rated for only 150 hours of standby and 4 hours of talk time. Both indexes are below the average for devices of such class.

Conclusion:

Is the M800 revolutionary device – definitely not. Is it worth upgrading from X800 – only if you really want QWERTY (there’s nothing else new). Is it worth getting? It depends, if you are on the market for a (Windows Mobile) smartphone, the M800 is still a nice device. Although it is neither the fastest, nor the prettiest (and yes, we don’t like the capacitive keys!) it is one of the few out there with a high-res (VGA) display. Of course, it has some negative sides, but it is a matter of compromise. Overall, the TyTN II is better, but only if you could live with the nowadays mediocre QVGA display. We leave the decision to you.