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Posted on 06/27/2005 5:14:31 AM PDT by N3WBI3
Motorola is set to ship another Linux/Java phone in Q4 2005. The E895 is a tri-band GSM cameraphone with a 1.3 megapixel camera, large LCD display, Bluetooth, and rich Internet, multimedia, video, and web capabilities, Motorola says. The company is demonstrating it at JavaOne this week.
The E895 is the sixth in Motorola's line of Linux-based phones, which includes business-oriented phones as well as multimedia-oriented phones for consumers. Previous models in the business line include the original A760, the video- and VPN-enabled A768, and the quad-band A780. Multimedia-oriented phones include the original E680 and its Bluetooth-enabled followup, the E680i.
Motorola E896 left, right, front, and back views (Click each image to enlarge)
The E895 has a flip-phone case similar to Motorola's previous A-series Linux phones, but incorporates rich multimedia capabilities more representative of the company's E-series line. These include a 1.3MP camera with multishot capabilities, video capture, photo and video editing, music playback, and slideshow software that supports adding music to video and photo slideshows.
User files are stored on internal Transflash memory, a relatively new kind of internal memory chip that phone users can upgrade, much as PC users might upgrade the size of their harddrive. The maximum capacity of the E895 is listed as 10MB.
Remarkably, Motorola claims the E895's 1000mAh battery yields a standby time of 200-250 hours, and enough minutes of talk time to put a serious dent in most users' calling plans on a single charge: 200-250 minutes. If true, these figures suggest Linux has made great progress in consumer electronics power management, possibly through the efforts of MontaVista, which has supplied the Linux used in all of Motorola's previous Linux phones.
Such stellar battery life suggests the E895 might be based on a single-chipset architecture, instead of the more power-hungry dual-chipset architectures used to date in all mobile phones with complex operating systems such as Symbian, Microsoft Windows Mobile, and Linux. Support for single-chipset mobile phone designs has been a focus for MontaVista, which in April rolled out its Mobilinux Linux phone operating system. At the time, a Montavista product marketing manager, Jacob Lehrbaum, said, "There are [single chipset] silicon options from TI, Philips, Freescale, and others. [For example], TI rolled out a product line back at 3GSM called OMAP Vox [story] which can be used as a single chipset solution."
Previous MontaVista phones have been based on Intel XScale chips.
Motorola lists the following features for the E895:
* Support for tri-band GSM, GPRS class 10, and EDGE (2.5G) class 10 networks * Internal tri-band antenna * 2.2-inch QVGA (320 x 240) TFT display with 262K colors * 1.3-inch 128 x 108 phone interface display, with 262K colors * Up to 10MB of user-upgradable internal TransFlash memory, to support user files and downloads * 1.3 megapixel multishot camera with flash, full-screen viewfinder, light meter, and 8x zoom * Video capture and playback * Photo editing and multimedia slideshow software with sound * Progressive downloading, to view video clips as the download * Media player with multiple codecs and streaming support * Mini-USB and headset jacks * Bluetooth supports stereo headphones, networking * Speakerphone * Linux OS * Improved user interface * J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) MIDP 2.0+ with enhanced APIs * Speaker-independent voice recognition requires no pre-recording * HTML/XHTML browser * IM and MMS * 1,000 mAh battery * 200-250 minutes of talk time, and 200-250 hours of standby, with Bluetooth off * Measures 2 x 3.7 x 0.9 inches (51 x 93 x 23 mm) * Displaces 88.4 cc * Weighs 4.5 ounces (127 grams) * Optional car kit, bluetooth headset, and other accessories
Motorola's GM of GSM products, Tracey Koziol, said, "Today's mobile users want to create and share their own content, as well as access existing entertainment and information."
Availability
The E895 is expected to be initially introduced in the Asia-Pacific region in Q4 of 2005.
A Motorola official in Taiwan said in January that the company will introduce 8-10 Linux/Java phones in Asia this year.
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