About me: My new Motorola L6

For the life of me, I finally bought a new phone after saving up money for the last 5 years…

Sounds pitiful? Shower me with money!

Anyway, you can read all about the phone’s specifications on the web, I am sure. Hence I will not elaborate, except some things about the phone I noticed:

• It’s small and flat. It takes time to get used to, since all the keys are so close to one another.



• The cover is brushed metal and not cheap plastic... so cool!



• You can’t text message in any language other than English, even though menus are available in Chinese.



• The camera sucks, judging by the picture of the mysterious wild panda sighting in the last post.
  
  Then again, all I needed is a phone, who in the world would be in their right mind to compare the photo quality with a *Canon digital camera anyway?

  *You know where my loyalty stands ;)

• Text messaging ~ Motorola uses it's proprietary iTap system.
  
  I love Nokia’s T9 system (messaging predictive text input) much better than the rest. But honestly I am starting to change my mind about that, even though this Motorola takes a wee while to get used to. I can see that iTap is a lot better than what people give it credit for. Let's compare...
  
  iTap CONS
  For example, when typing a non-standard word such as “Xceed”:
  Nokia’s T9 will prompt you with different combination of letters, and choices of words. When you finally decide that the choices are not what you want, you will be prompted by the system to input a word manually. Once done, the word will be used in the current message, and stored in the dictionary for future messages.
  
  Motorola’s iTap will also go through a list of words. At the end of it, if there were nothing that suits your needs, you’d have to delete the whole word, and start all over, switch to manual input mode, and type.

  *What a waste of time!

PROS
Note though, that ANY word you type on iTap, not only in messages, but also names in the address book, will be stored in iTap for any future use. So when you get a brand new phone, it might take awhile to get the empty iTap dictionary going. But after some time, it gets better. This is the strongest point of Motorola over the others, because T9 ‘remembers’ only when in messaging mode.

Another key thing about Motorola’s iTap is that it does symbols really well, such as the apostrophes. Typing a word such as “Vincent’s” on iTap will be no problem. It even remembers smileys of the likes of “:)”.

Smileys are absolutely hopeless with the likes of T9. By the time you get to “Vincent”, and try to continue with “ 's ”, it would have switched off when you press the 1-button (symbols). Manual mode is needed input the last two characters.



Bravo iTap!

Note that I bought this phone in Kota Kinabalu. Initially, I thought it would be more expensive, comparing with the "main land" on the likes of grocery and car prices. I compared prices with those my sister quoted me from around Kuala Lumpur, between RM750 (USD$200) ~ RM850 (USD$226). It isn't even guaranteed that I'd get an original warranty.

*Surprise surprise!

I believe I got a good deal ~ RM670 (USD$180), which includes all original Motorola warranty. From what I hear from word of mouth, KK is indeed cheaper overall, simply due to the competition.

Come buy a phone in KK!