Motorola E1000

Discontinued
9th March 2004

Motorola have been hugely busy filling out their product line with a massive range of products, from the low end C-series candy bar phones, E-series entertainment phones, V-series clamshells and A-series phones for 3G networks. The E1000 is a bit of a hybrid, it's a 3G phone with strong entertainment features marking it out as a unique and interesting offering for 3G customers.

The E1000 comes with a 240x320 pixel display in 65,000 colours, has a built-in camera with an impressive 1.2 megapixel resolution (1280x960 pixels), GPS (global positioning system), Bluetooth, Push-to-talk, MP3 and video playback and even more. The feature set is pretty similar to the A1000 but with a different emphasis. Above all, the E1000 is meant to be fun, and the emphasis here is on audio and video playback, with improved speakers and TriFlash R memory expansion.

Push-to-talk (PTT) gives the E1000 walkie-talkie style capabilities, meaning that you can talk to other people, either individually or in groups over a low cost voice-over-data solution. Motorola have several other PTT products for GSM, but the E1000 is the first time we've seen it on 3G.

On top of all of this, the E1000 offers the usual things you'd expect in any high-end phone such as Java, MMS, WAP and support for 2G GPRS/GSM transmission.

Right at the moment the 3G market is tiny, and Motorola have shown enormous faith in it by providing handset after handset, presumably to gain market share. The E1000 won't be everyone's cup of tea, but as a flagship product it is certainly very impressive.