Preview: Motorola Capri
Jun 22, 2006, 8:22 AM by Rich Brome @richbrome
An exclusive hands-on preview of Motorola's unannounced RAZR-style slider phone.
Hardware
At last July's MOTONOW event, Motorola dropped the first tantalizing hints of a RAZR-style slider phone. Then this February, Motorola launched the "Z," a slider phone with distinct RAZR innfluence. Unfortunately the Z was only for Korea.
Now Phone Scoop is able to bring you an exclusive preview of the real RAZR-style slider - the one for the rest of the world:
We don't know the actual model name yet. It could bear the famous RAZR brand (RAZR Z3, perhaps?) although it could just as easily carry a new name, such as "SLDR". All we know at this point is the code name: "Capri".
The overall feel of the phone is excellent. It's a nice size and weight, and the construction quality is quite good.
Like on the RAZR, the housing is mostly metal. Our unit had a "soft touch" rubberized finish. This finish not only looks and feels great, but also resists fingerprint smudges and makes the phone much easier to grip.
The slide mechanism is spring-assisted, so it "snaps" open and closed. Our prototype unit had a very powerful spring action.
One design element borrowed from the RAZR is the antenna bulge at the bottom. This makes the phone difficult to open compared to most other slide-style phones. Since you can't just push on the bottom edge to slide it open, you have to use the raised ridge directly below the display. Unfortunately doing this usually leaves a nice big thumb-print on the bottom of the display, and takes quite a bit of effort due to the powerful spring that holds it shut. To avoid smudging the display, I found myself pushing against the side of the phone to slide it open. The rubberized finish makes this feasible, although it still required quite a bit of effort.
It should be noted that our unit was pre-production hardware, so the slide action could be improved by the time it reaches store shelves.
Regardless, the good news is that this phone certainly won't open by accident in your pocket, something that can be an issue with other sliders.
Like the RAZR, the keypad looks pretty, but also looks terribly unergonomic. Looks are deceiving though, because - just like the RAZR - the keypad is actually a joy to use. Compared to the RAZR keypad, the closer key spacing and fewer rubber dividers don't seem to hinder ergonomics or usability one bit.
Yet another technology carried over from the RAZR is EL (electro-luminescent) backlighting behind the keys. Unlike standard LED backlights that are notoriously uneven, EL technology provides perfectly even light. While the RAZR keys have a blue glow, this phone switches to a cool white color, which looks even better.
The metal battery cover is released via a small button on the top. Just like on the RAZR, you can easily release the battery cover and pull it away in one motion using a fingernail.
The microSD memory card slot is located under the battery cover. It is hot-swappable, so you can swap cards without turning off the phone.
Like all phones currently on the market, this phone has a flaw that prevents it from fully supporting 2 GB memory cards (like the SanDisk card shown above). Like most current phones, you can use a 2 GB card if you format it in the phone, but then the card only works as a 1 GB card.
If this phone properly adhered to the SD card specification, it would work fine with 2 GB cards, but they made an error in implementing the firmware that limits the memory card to 1 GB. It's hard to blame to Motorola for this, since every other manufacturer has made the exact same mistake. This issue affects all current phones with either a microSD or miniSD memory card slot.
While Nokia is committed to fixing the issue and supporting 2 GB cards in all new phones shipping in Q3, other manufacturers are taking longer to address the problem. Motorola plans to start supporting 2 GB cards in some phones by the end of Q3, but it's not clear if this model will receive that fix before it ships.
The good news is that this phone does have FOTA (firmware over-the-air), so even if it doesn't support 2 GB cards at launch, that could (theoretically) be fixed in a update delivered automatically over the network.
Whenever Motorola and other manufacturers finally start shipping phones that support them, SanDisk is ready to start shipping 2 GB cards immediately. They're ready to go (as you can see) - just waiting for phone support.
The SIM card fits in a slot under the microSD card.
This phone also has a standard mini-USB port. This port supports just about everything you might want to do with USB, including charging, data to a laptop, direct printing (PictBridge), and mass storage mode for direct access to the memory card from a PC.
Above the display are two LED indicator lights. A green one on the left lights up with a battery icon when charging. The right one is blue, with a Bluetooth logo, and shows Bluetooth activity. Both are invisible when not lit.
Measuring 17mm thick, it's 3mm thicker than the RAZR, but that's to be expected given the extra room needed for the slide mechanism that runs most of its length. It's also 14 grams heavier than the RAZR, but I still wouldn't call it heavy, and the extra weight keeps it from feeling cheap. There was a slight amount of wiggle in the slide mechanism when open, but I didn't notice it until I checked for it; in everyday use the mechanism feels very well-constructed.
The phone is quad-band GSM. It seems to have EDGE as well. That's our assumption, at least, based on the little "E" icon that frequently appeared at the top of the screen.
It would have been nice to see a larger, QVGA display on this baby, but the 176 x 220 pixel display it does have is quite good. It is very bright, with great color, and looks great indoors and out, even in direct sunlight. Motorola has also tweaked the fonts to look a bit nicer and use a bit of anti-aliasing for a smoother look. Our only gripe about the display is that it seems to be 65,000 colors instead of 262,000. That's not a big deal in most cases, but there was the occasional photo where you could see some banding.
Motorola recently signed a deal with David Beckham for the soccer star to be a "brand ambassador" for the company. Given the timing of World Cup, we thought it would be appropriate to use a Beckham wallpaper for our photo session. However, as of this writing Team USA is still in the running, which is why we used a flag as a backdrop in the photos above - to show support for the home team. Go USA!
Software
The new RAZR slider technically uses Motorola's same "Synergy" UI (user interface) that most of us have come to know and hate. However, the latest version - present in both this phone and the forthcoming "Canary" clamshell model - is greatly improved over past versions. It's still just as ugly - with icons that look like 80s computer graphics - but nearly all of the major usability issues and function limitations have been fixed. Motorola finally seems to have come up with a UI that's almost on par with the competition.
The improved UI keeps the few things I liked about past versions, including the extensive options for customizing shortcuts from the home screen. There's a very long list of options you can assign to any direction on the d-pad, or to either of the two soft-keys.
It also keeps Motorola's wonderful "auto-cleanup" system for automatically deleting old text messages. You can set any number of days you want to keep old messages, or an exact number of messages to keep. Many phones from other manufacturers require you to manually delete messages when memory fills up, a constant annoyance for heavy texters. I remain completely baffled as to why all manufacturers don't offer this type of auto-delete feature.
Motorola is not known for camera quality, and indeed the camera quality on our unit was dreadful. It was a prototype, so it will almost certainly improve before it ships. However, with a tiny lens and no auto-focus, I don't have particularly high expectations. At least it is 2 megapixel.
As is now standard on any decent slider phone, the camera interface operates in full-screen landscape mode. The controls are quite good. When you want to change something, you simply press up or down to select an option, and left or right to adjust it. After a second or two the controls disappear for a better view.
The night mode and white balance options are cleverly grouped together in a setting called "lighting conditions". Digital zoom, exposure (brightness), and "style" (special effects like black-and-white and negative) round out the on-screen controls.
The "Options" soft-key awkwardly breaks out of landscape mode, forcing you to turn the phone 90 degrees to change settings like resolution, quality, and save location (internal memory or memory card). It's possible this will be corrected in the final version.
The video capture mode can record long videos until the memory is full. Unfortunately video is limited to QCIF resolution, which is unusually small for a modern 2-megapixel camera phone.
The LED flash seems reasonably powerful, although we didn't have time to head to the bar for a real-world test.
After you take a photo, you can simply press the shutter button again to automatically save the photo and take another. That's a vast improvement over past Motorola phones that essentially deleted photos by default.
The phone includes the latest version of iTAP for predictive text. It's pretty slick, supporting word prediction, multiple simultaneous languages (for the Spanglish speakers in the house), and intuitive visual aids.
I was happy to see full Bluetooth support, including A2DP for rockin' out with stereo audio.
Options for Bluetooth transfer and printing appear in every sub-menu throughout the UI where you might hope to find them. Using Bluetooth for just about anything is a breeze.
It also sports extensive Bluetooth security options. While most phones only let you set a paired device as authorized or not authorized, this phone lets you set authorization for each profile of each paired device.
One annoying "feature" carried over from past Motorola phones is that all sounds will play through a paired Bluetooth headset - even keypad tones, and even if the connection is idle. It seems silly to "wake up" a Bluetooth headset just to play a little beep. Turning off key tones avoids this issue.
However, one benefit of this quirk is that the phone will play music through a regular (mono) Bluetooth headset. Many other music phones with stereo Bluetooth will only play music via the A2DP profile, and not via the headset or handsfree profiles.
As anyone who has ever used a Motorola phone can attest, the phone book has long been the most embarrassingly awful part of Motorola's UI. Fortunately, it has been seriously overhauled in this new version. It's now completely on par with the rest of the industry, and even offers a few unique innovations that might put it slightly ahead of the pack.
First, the old way of organizing entries around numbers instead of names is now completely gone (except when dealing with the SIM card memory, like all GSM phones). Now one person = one entry, just as it should be. Multiple numbers for the same person are always shown together as part of the same contact entry. (Finally!)
There are also options for sorting by either first or last name, and an interesting new option to display contacts by most recently called, keeping people you call often right at the top of the list.
Like past Motorola phones, you can scroll vertically through the list of names, and then scroll left/right to choose an alternate number. It was kind of a hidden feature, though, so now Motorola has added a helpful little arrow icon to show when there are multiple numbers to scroll through.
Last but certainly not least, you can finally jump right to a contact by typing the first several letters of the name. Past Moto phones only let you type the first letter, or forced you to use a separate "search" screen that required far too many extra key presses to be useful. Now you can just type "jo" to skip right past the Jessicas and Jennifers to call John.
Motorola's new options for syncing your contacts and calendar with your PC or over the network are collectively called MOTOSYNC. This phone includes MOTOSYNC, and it supports both SyncML and Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync.
The phone includes a Java-based music player. It's pretty basic, but it does all the basic things a music player should. Adding music is as simple as dropping MP3 files into the "audio" folder on the memory card, which can be done via USB mass storage mode, or yanking the card out and using a card reader. The music player automatically reads ID3 tags when you start the application, so it knows the title, artist, album, etc. for each song. Unfortunately, you can't play music in the background while you do other things.
The phone does have a flight-safe mode. Oddly, it uses the new CEA standard icon in the menus, but not on the idle screen where it is actually intended to be used.
In summary, I came away impressed with this phone. My only notable gripes were the camera quality and difficult-to-open slide mechanism, both of which may be addressed to some degree in final tweaking before launch. This new phone has all of the style, class, and quality that made the RAZR such a huge hit. It even feels a little more refined than the RAZR, and fixes the major flaws with Moto's previous UI. While it may not be the "ultimate" phone when it comes to music or photos, for example, it does strike an excellent balance between features and size. With so much going for it, it looks like Motorola may have another hit on their hands.
About the author, Rich Brome:Editor in Chief Rich became fascinated with cell phones in 1999, creating mobile web sites for phones with tiny black-and-white displays and obsessing over new phone models. Realizing a need for better info about phones, he started Phone Scoop in 2001, and has been helming the site ever since. Rich has spent two decades researching and covering every detail of the phone industry, traveling the world to tour factories, interview CEOs, and get every last spec and photo Phone Scoop readers have come to expect. As an industry veteran, Rich is a respected voice on phone technology of the past, present, and future.
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Comments
since the z isn't coming to cdma anyone know if this will?
(continues)
Since the phone is already out in Korea, it MUST be a CDMA model....
I can't understand why Mot brings phones out in the USA on creaky old GSM first, when 65% of American subscribers use CDMA....
...
(continues)
When is it coming out?
The Z or Capri....
Rich- do your homework, new phonebook has been out for a while
Phones like the V3x have not come to the US. Phone Sc...
(continues)
you guys got him good. 🤣
Name?
I don't understand..
One of the main reasons I but a flip phone is to protect the main screen inside the phone. Sliders don't do anything to protect it.
I would also think that with trying to get the key pad out, it could cause the phone to fall out of my hands easier.
(continues)
2GB Card problems
Does the Motorola Q have the same problem with 2GB cards as this does?
Thanks.
There are a few Nokias shipping in other countries that support 2 GB cards - like the N80, E70, 6265, 6125, 6131, and 6270. Those - and I think the Sidekick 3 - ...
(continues)
i've seen and felt the phone first hand
Carrier for the Capri
The tape was not covering up a carrier logo.
Like most GSM phones, it displays the name of the current network on the home screen. It says "T-Mobile" only because I inserted a T-Mobile SIM card, s...
(continues)
Great News about the UI improvements!
3g???
awwwww
hot-swappable card
🙄
It would have been nice to see a larger, QVGA display on this baby, but the 176 x 220 pixel display it does have is quite good. ...
Comparable to T809/D807?
For overall User interface, does the Moto trump the Samsungs?
And last but not least, in your personal opinions, do you expect this to sell more than the two Samsungs becasue it is a razr phone?
tuolumne said:
Does the build quality feel better than the Samsung duo?
I think all three are pretty decent in terms of build quality, but depending on the final revisions to the Capri hardware before release, it does...
(continues)
RAZR.. no big deal... however
