Motorola E725 Launch
Mar 23, 2005, 7:00 PM by Rich Brome @rbrome
On-the-scene report from FFWDMOTO at the M3 music festival in Miami. Full coverage of the new E725 music phone.
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Every March, the electronic music industry converges on Miami Beach for the Winter Music Conference and Miami Music and Multimedia, otherwise known as M3. Every night for a whole week, dozens of massive parties take place all over the city, filled with the sounds of the hottest DJs in the world.
This year, the event made a fitting backdrop for Motorola to launch their new E725 music phone.
The E725 is a CDMA phone for North America. Among its key features are EV-DO high-speed data and the BREW platform for applications and games. Although Motorola can't officially say which carrier might offer it, Verizon is the only major carrier at the moment with that combination of technologies.
Although the E725 is a respectable phone for most any purpose, the focus is on music. Like most new higher-end phones these days, it sports a memory card slot (miniSD) for storing large numbers of music files. An FM radio and built-in stereo speakers are also part of the package.
If that were all there was to it, it wouldn't be much different from several phones announced last week at the CTIA show. But where the E725 goes the extra mile are with features like the 3.5mm headset jack and FM transmitter.
While most phones these days have small 2.5mm jacks that only work with cell-phone headsets, the full-size 3.5mm jack on the E725 lets you jam with a full set of stereo headphones.
But the most unique feature of the E725 is definitely the FM transmitter. FM radio receivers are nothing new, (and the E725 has one of those, too,) but the E725 also lets you broadcast MP3s in stereo to a nearby FM radio - perfect for pumping tunes through a car stereo system.
The music player application on the E725 is implemented as a BREW application. This means it can easily be customized by carriers to integrate with their own over-the-air music download services. The EV-DO data capability ensures songs will download quickly.
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The design of the E725 is stylish, although not everyone will like the way the two halves of it look like two devices slapped together. Despite the appearance, the slide mechanism feels quite solid.
Spending a little time using it, it mostly seems like a well-built, well-designed device. But there was one small issue I found a little annoying...
In theory, the navigation wheel is a great idea, providing traditional four-way button navigation when you want it, and spinning action for scrolling through those long playlists (although it works everywhere else, too). But it gets dicey when you want to press in for the OK/select action. Because the wheel moves so many different ways, it feels a little wobbly, making it hard to hold still and press straight down. Hopefully it will be tweaked by the time it reaches market.
Other features of the phone include a nice 176 x 220 pixel display, and a VGA camera. It's a little surprising to not find a megapixel camera on a phone otherwise this advanced, but the focus is squarely on music. With so many phones trying to do everything and doing none of it well, it is a little refreshing to see a phone that has a clear focus in one area, and hopefully does that one thing (music) well.
The E725 also features rhythm lights and haptics (advanced vibration effects) that can sync to music and BREW games. Here's a super-quick video clip showing the rhythm lights in action:
QuickTime format
File size: 310 KB
The E725 is slated to be available before the end this half (June).
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
Nuts, Verizon...
(continues)
Hey look! "Real" photos even Mmcnier can enjoy.
Blue-tooth?
I love that fact that this phone has stereo speaker phone. How about dual speaker phone?
Motorola make good speaker phone, lound and clear. I love it.
All I need is blue-tooth (voice dialing) and speaker phone. MP3 player I don't really use it.
Thanks to Rich Brome about the info. I saw this phone earlier but I cound not find more info and pics about this phone. I knew phonescoop would post it first whenever it is announced
Don't expect this one anytime soon
