Phones.com » Cell Phones » Review of the Motorola EM30

The MOTOROKR EM30 is nice for a music phone, the slim candybar design fits any pocket nicely. It’s 10.9 mm thick, and weighs a mere 100 grams. What’s interesting about the EM30 is the ModeShift technology; the EM30 looks and acts like just a music player with lit up music keys when in ‘Music’ mode. This switching can be done via the “modeshift” key on the side of the phone. The top has a 3.5 mm output plug to hook up your favourite earphones. The phone comes in two attractive colors: Black Silver and Red. The EM30 definitely feels good in one’s hands. Text entry would be difficult for most people with the EM30’s flush keypad design. What’s unique is that it is unique as a music phone. The rear of the EM30 has a tiny aperture at the top for its camera, and a loudspeaker at the bottom-most. There’s an attractive 2.0 inch QVGA display, and support for Landscape screen.

The Motorola EM30 doubles up as a music player with the dedicated music keys; the numeric keys glow red when music mode is activated. The music player is simple to operate, and displays basic Track info. There’s support for RealAudio on the EM30. Playback is controlled by a total of 7 keys in music mode. There’s also an FM Radio with RDS and the newer “song recognition” feature found on music phones. This records a sample clip and queries an Internet server to retrieve details of the Track. There’s about 30MB of internal memory, and Motorola bundles an optional 8GB card with the MOTOROKR EM30. Special features on the phone include an Airplane mode, Text-to-Speech and Ringtone-editor. Bundled PIM features on the phone are satisfactory. E-Mail and HTML browsing are supported on the Landscape screen too. The 2.0 megapixel camera of the MOTOROKR EM30 took less-than-decent pictures. Another fuss was the lack of a hot-swappable microSD slot.

The EM30 is a Quadband Moto, it can pretty much work anywhere there’s a carrier. Sadly there’s no support for 3G. However it is very reasonably priced, and targeted toward Music lovers. The EM30 nevertheless satisfies connectivity needs with EDGE Class 12 and GPRS support. There’s no Wi-Fi but Bluetooth 2.0. For some reason data transfer over Bluetooth was slow. The phone still supports A2DP and AVRCP profiles. USB 2.0 support makes up for PC connectivity, mass storage and synchronization.

Battery performance was average on the Motorola EM30, with a rated 6-hour talk time. Standby was mentioned as 300 hours. The Motorola resists a normal usage of at least 2 days, since powered by the 970mAh Li-ion battery.

Motorola’s strategy for targeting music lovers was indeed a success, we must confess as the Motorola MOTOROKR EM30 appears to be a sweet deal. It is indeed wise to get the MOTOROKR EM30 if you want a unique music phone that knows its job well.