I bought this mobile after a very brief survey on the net. First I bought it for my fiancee and then when I saw it, without thinking much went and bought one for myself. The facts that made me like this phone are,
- being a Linux based phone (E6 is powered by Motorola's custom kernel) I had a hope that we a lot of modified firmware as well as custom kernels which will enhance the phone features etcetera.
- The cheapest touch screen phone AFAIK.
- Had trust with Motorola as I have seen my friend using a moto for over 2 years and we literally played football with that phone. I heard that phone is still working after 5+ years.
Well its been 1 month+ that I am using this phone. I have not done much with this phone except, flashing it once and put a modified firmware which enable a few features in the phone. The firmware which I used is AhMan's Hybrid. You can see the release info and features added in his forum thread. One feature that made me smile wide was that I was able to edit the shortcuts in the home screen. I always wanted to change the FM shortcut to Alarm shortcut.
But...
Should I have bought this phone for the reason that it was running Linux and hence its open source ? Well Motorola is not a sweet and user friendly company as they seems to be (more). Motorola has set up a nice web page which has a FQDN http://opensource.motorola.com. It looks like only the web site has the name open source, not that they have released the source for E6 which, seems from the forum conversation, is licensed under GPL. A Motorola spokesman repeatedly assures that its their obligation to release the code as per the GPL terms blah blah, but seems to be "working on it for eternity". The commitment Motorola has shown in releasing the source for E6 puts me off from thinking that Motorola is a customer/community friendly company. They seems to be more committed to working on newer versions after releasing the E6 and hence there is no update firmware from Motorola for E6. Guess I made a mistake in buying this model without a proper research.
Still...
My phone works as a phone. I can make calls, I can use the camera, I can listen to songs and FM, I can browse the web. So I am not at a great loss, after all, features are a fantasy come true for a day and then you just go back to 'using it as a phone'.
9 comments:
After installing AhMan’s Hybrid which mentions having Busybox, were you able to connect to the phone in the terminal and use stuff? Do u have access to the file system?
No Prashanth, I have to admit it wasnt a pleasant experience after loading ahman's monster pack. The problems were,
1) Inaccurate reading of the battery power level (at one point it will show 50% full and then you finish a 2 minute call to findout your are running low on battery)
2) Phone gets rebooted often without a warning.
I had rolled back to the generic motorola firmware today after a hard time. Now the phone looks stable so far. If you are planning to buy this phone, dont. I had times when I felt I will throw this on the wall and break it. I just despise the moment I decided to buy this, not one but two.. I dont like this phone at all.
Just go to www.motorolafans.com and feel the difference dear...................
Well..thats not right..
I recommend people to buy this phone because at a cost of 10K today
- It can give great touch screen experience, typing, copy paste, browsing etc
- Good camera equal to 5700 or better 2MP camera especially the manual macro mode switch near the lens. but no flash :(
- Great Video capture with high resolution
- Can play GBA Games, have video playback of various formats with unofficial softwares
- Amazing Music and FM !!! This is the main reason.. They equal or better than SE phones some times,.. not always..
- Speed !!! JAVA Games are very fast... have many java 3d games... especially i love the touch screen games like Age of empires, sudoku, a lot of other touch screen supported games.
- 320x240 resolution 2.4 inch screen...
- I rip dvds to 3gp or mp4 and watch movies... they are just awesome when u watch them with earphones...
- Superb browsing experience with opera mini and Morange... with EDGE !!!!
- Sleek look and slim with all of these... and also better battery compared to others..
As you see no phone in the market exists today with all these features... look and cost
If its just the looks, I would have gone for SE. Maybe just with me, but when I play games or listen to music, the battery drains pretty fast. I dont find the keypad (English) easy to type while on move (train or bus). The amount of concentration I have to put for typing a few words are excessive when compared to those traditional phones with or without a qwerty keyboard. But the worst of all, in my view is, the fact that the phone doesn't play streaming video (m.vtap.com or m.youtube.com). I find it extremely strange to see the phone complaining that it cant play the content even after I download the 3gp content (m.vtap.com allows you to download or stream the video content. check it out its a cool service) to my phone and try. There maybe some work around, but considering the fact that similar phones from SE and Nokia with realplayer handles streaming video/audio out of the box, I despise the moment I decided on E6. There are more problems which I can scrap here, but these are the main features missing as far as I am concerned.
i hav a motorola e6 nd i want to put a movie in it ....help!
I am using this phone for last 6months, I like this phone. If you have interest in doing some research and modify it, this is an awesome phone.
I flashed my phone's software(firmware) to an older version 10p to 8p, Now it allows to install pkg files( native linux packages). I have installed winamp player for audio which have good interface similar to normal computer player, and QEZXPlayer as video player which will play all formats including mpeg, mov, flv, avi, mp4 also play 800*600 videos, I telnet into the phone and changed configuration files and customized all the shortcut, changed bluetooth discoverable time to 5min. etc...
In my opinion if you are ready to experiment with this phone, you will like this phone very much,
Otherwise it is just an ordinary phone with mp4, 3gp player and pdf, excel and word viewer.
i cant search theme for motorokr e6
how to play you tube videos on the moto rokr E6?????
please please please...help!!!!
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