Motorola E398 TriBand Mobile Phone w/Camera (3)
Bluetooth 27 July 2004

Multimedia

The E398 is a truly multimedia phone. If you read our discussions in our forum, we have been checking out the various phones that has external storage. This is a natural trend for phones as we need more space to store images and midi or mp3 ringtones.

E398 comes equipped with only 5 MB of memory and that could be quite limited. Thanks to Motorola, they provided a 64M Transflash for the phone. Now you can take photos and store them into the transflash card and use the transflash adaptor to transfer capture images to your PC for emailing to your friends. You can also use bluetooth to transfer the images as well.

If you were to compared to Nokia 6230 which uses the MMC, the transflash card is tiny, you can see a photo of it below which we compared the size with SIM Card and.

The built in CMOS camera has a 4x digital zoom and you can enable auto-time capture and flash. Various lighting conditions can be set for best image capture. They are Automatic, Sunny, cloudy, Indoor (home), Indoor (office), Night. Picture quality is good. The colour reproduction is very beautiful and I don't see bluish corners in the captured images using VGA capture mode. (see photos on the next page).

The phone supports both MP3 and MIDI ringtones. You can turn it into a MP3 player if you wish by storing the MP3 songs into the transflash card using the adaptor plugged into a PC USB card reader. If you want to use a MP3 as your ringtone, you have to transfer the MP3 to your phone's memory. I just hope that you can do that directly from your external Transflash instead of spending time copying into the 5MB memory. A 4 minute MP3 will definitely used up all the memory on the phone (internal).

The ringtones, whether be it MIDI or MP3 is loud. It seems to have that sense surround effect when playing the MP3 files. The audio output seems to be coming from the left and right sides of the mobile phone. The average vibration is very effective when the phone is placed on a hard surface but might not be strong enough if you put it in your pocket.

Connectivity

Bluetooth can be used to transfer ringtones and images to and fro from PDA, phones or PC equipped with Bluetooth. The only problem we noticed is that the phone does not allow easy transfer of Java programs to the phone. Although the packages a data cable, the software in the CD-ROM does not provide an interface for you to transfer Java programs.

As for using bluetooth, we had no luck either. According to our correspondence with Motorola, they mentioned that it is locked so that the only way to download is via GPRS.

On some Motorola models, some people have managed to use Bluetooth to transfer Java apps. You would need to check if your Bluetooth device supports OBEX Object Push. My PDA and my friends notebook doesn't. Alternatively, you can download a software MIDWAY to transfer JAVA files through the data cable (It is not very straightforward).

The Lens and flash at the back of the phone	The SIM card (left) and transflash (right)
TransFlash Adaptor	The tiny TransFlash. Make sure you don't drop it, it might be difficult to locate it.
Flash Light set to ON	Image capture with Flash on to lit the dark surfaces.

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