Motorola E398 Review

MOTOROLA -- I have to sit through miles of crap music coming from tinny speakers on other passengers' mobile phones so it is wonderful listiening to the quality stereo sound coming from the Motorola E-398. Its powerful stereo speakers deliver an exciting and loud performance. Sound is very important for the youth market and phone marketers know they have to appeal to this market segment. What is very important to realise is that the youth feature set is different than the business feature set. My 13 year old neighbourhood expert told me this. ("I wouldn't want a boring business phone. They're boring.") Right so. What we're looking for is youth design and lifestyle functions. So the text function has to be spot-on (good tactile key experience) and things like quality speakers for playback rock the world.

Here's one fact I have seen close-up: the Irish youth phone market blew aside many marketing predictions. Teenagers like experimenting with technology. They're attracted by it and insist on it.

Things like music storage technology make the difference in this market segment. You can transfer music onto the phone from several music jukebox services (like T-mobile's), use Bluetooth or drag and drop onto a TransFlash storage card.

The menu on the phone uses a joystick--cool effect and faster than the motojumble menus that accompany these phones. The image quality on screenis VGA-fine and the on-board camera works like other low-end cameraphones.

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