Motorola A925

Discontinued
21st January 2004

The Motorola A925 represents Motorola's fourth handset for the Hutchison 3 network in Europe, and it represents a steady improvement over the previous A920 model.

Like most 3G phones, the A925 is a big, chunky thing weighing 210 grams and measuring a fairly large 148x60x24 mm, even larger and heavier than the O2 XDA II - and this is a problem that most of the current range of 3G phones have. Plus, 3G phones have notoriously short battery lives, and the A925 is no exception with a paltry 90 minutes of talktime and just under three days standby time. Best not to be too far away from your charger - fortunately it's likely to ship with a spare battery. The A925 is not much of a looker, but it's at least better than the pug ugly A920 it replaces.

OK, so the bad points are really down to size, weight, looks and battery life. However, the Motorola A925 is a hugely powerful device that is a lot more that just a phone.

First of all, there's a 208x320 pixel touchscreen in 65,000 colours. This is pretty good, but again, the O2 XDA II beats it - and the Nokia 7700 blasts it out of the water. The Motorola A925 has an inbuilt 640x480 pixel resolution camera that can take stills and low-resolution video clips, which is about average. It can play MP3s and movie clips, supports Java for applications and games, has a WAP 2.0 web browser and email client and runs on the powerful Symbian 7.0 operating system.

In terms of connectivity, the A925 is a dual UMTS (3G) / tri-band GSM phone, so it should give you basic functionality if you roam out of a 3G covered area. UMTS data transfer is up to 384kbps downstream and 64kbps upstream, or if running on a non-3G network it will use GPRS giving up to around 46kbps. You can connect the Motorola A925 to a PC via Bluetooth, infra-red or a USB cable. This is the phones strongest point - if you connect it up to a laptop you'll have fast Internet access anywhere there's 3G coverage, and Bluetooth means that you can keep the phone in your pocket or bag while doing it.

There's 8Mb of built in memory, plus a supplied 32Mb card that goes in the SD/MMC slot. If you want to use it as an MP3 player, then you'll need at least 64Mb free to fit a CD's worth of data in, so upgrading it is probably worthwhile.

Apart from the usual bells and whistles that all phones have these days, the final trick with the Motorola A925 is an inbuilt GPS (Global Positioning System) capability, allowing you find exactly where you are anywhere in the world and use optional routeplanning and mapping applications. It's not know as yet if Hutchison will support this on their European 3G networks.

Don't forget that 3G phones are not like GSM phones, they are weaker in many respects and stronger in others. Compared to the sparse collection of other 3G phones on the market, the A925 is certainly the most powerful.

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