Motorola A1800

Available now (China)
3rd June 2008
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We have good news and bad news.. the good news is that the Motorola A1800 is a touchscreen smartphone with built-in GPS, and it's a rare handset that supports GSM and CDMA. The bad news is that you are unlikely to ever see one if you live outside of China.

The latest in a series of "MOTOMING" handsets aimed at the Chinese market, the Motorola A1800 demonstrates just what Motorola can do when it's not making warmed-over RAZR phones.

Support for GSM and CDMA is exceptionally rare in a mobile phone, and in fact Motorola are the only mainstream manufacturer that we know of who make handsets like this. Before that A1800 was the Z6c, and before that the very rare A840. Both CDMA and GSM networks are common in China, which perhaps explains why it has been launched there first.. but many frequent flyers between the US and Europe could be interested in the A1800 too.

The Motorola A1800 has a 2.4" 240 x 320 pixel display, has expandable memory (up to 4GB), built-in GPS, handwriting recognition, a viewer for Office documents, email client and web browser. On the back is a 3 megapixel camera with autofocus. It isn't a 3G phone, and one serious omission is the lack of WiFi.

Despite the large 1000 mAh battery, the standby time on the A1800 is very short, at around 3.5 - 4.5 days. This is mostly down to the high power drain when running a CDMA and GSM radio at the same time. On either GSM or CDMA the talktime is a reasonable 3.5 to 5 hours.

Maps of mainland China are included, but nowhere else. Of course, it is theoretically possible to have other maps on the A1800 from different regions, but so far we have only seen this in China.

So perhaps the Motorola A1800 would need some reworking before it was suitable for US or European markets, although presumably it does support English as well as Chinese. And although the A1800 is perhaps not an iPhone killer, it would be a welcome addition to Motorola's worldwide lineup. We will wait and see.