I really, really love this phone, and it’s not for any rational, logical reason either.
It’s mainly because it runs an embedded version of Linux I guess, and the current package they’ve been hawking in the malls includes a pair of Bluetooth wireless headphones (not the piddly little thing people use to answer calls, mind you, but a full-sized pair of cushioned cans).
I’ve seen it being sold at about PhP26,000 (about US$450), which is a great deal since you get a full-featured PDA-Phone and a very cool pair of headphones (which are worth about PhP4,000 all by themselves).
So why am I not falling all over myself to buy this thing? (It’s not that I promised not to spend on any gadgets until December … promises are made to be broken after all.) Ironically, it’s for the same reason why I like it so much: it runs Linux.
I spent practically the whole morning reading up on this thing and it seems that the only way to get it to sync with your Outlook folders is to install Moto’s proprietary Mobile Phone Tools suite on your machine, and manually press "SYNC" every time you want the process to run. (No "ActiveSync"-like applications have been written to run under Linux as of yet, so apart from setting up some kind of OTAP Server, there’s no other way to synchronize your data.) Now, that situation by itself, is not a huge issue, but I’ve had a bit of experience with MPT (I used it a lot with my Moto V500), and well … I hated it. Transferring files was always touch-and-go, and synchronizing PIM data was like pulling teeth. And if that’s the only way I can run a synchronization process with this phone, I dunno … I’d probably hate that too.
The thing is, the only reason why I want a pda-phone in the first place is because it’s such a hassle to save contact information in my Outlook address book, then manually re-enter it on my phone. It’s also really inconvenient to be in the middle of a meeting and have to enter meeting dates and schedules on the Tablet (which incidentally, doesn’t always have the most current set of schedules because it’s an equally big hassle to sync it with my desktop). Having a dedicated scheduler device is pretty much the only way I can keep things straight in my head, and I’ve been surviving this long by switching approaches every week. One week, I’ll be writing out my schedule on the Tablet’s InkDesktop, another week I’ll be entering it into my YahooCalendar, and the next week I’ll be managing everything through Outlook. Not exactly the most cohesive (or comprehensible) way of doing this, I know.
But I digress.
Clearly, the fact that the Moto is being marketed as a "music phone" instead of a "productivity device" should have been enough to deter me. I mean, I love my music more than the average person, but even I have to admit that having 2 separate music devices on your person would be too much.
Even so, it took me a couple of hours to convince myself that this wasn’t the phone for me (which was a significant achievement because I swear to God a couple of times I was almost out the door with credit card in hand, before I got a hold of myself). Mostly I did it by focusing my gadget-lust on something else entirely, namely this baby, which won’t be available locally until God only knows when.