Eten M800 Review

Interface:

Software-wise, Eten M800 is yet another Windows Mobile 6 Professional phone. In this aspect, it is a 100% copy of the X800. Eten follows the trend and slightly personalizes the interface to be “more user friendly”. In addition to increasing the font size in a few menus (the contacts, messaging), it changes the home screen, utilizing a limited version of SPB software (Mobile Shell).. In the upper part there is a toolbar with four buttons, but two more can be added. Their order can be customized, but we will examine it as preset in the factory.


The first icon indicates the battery remaining, but when selected, a menu appears showing the last twelve applications used. The second one is a shortcut to the World Clocks and Alarms menu, the third one leads to the Weather Forecast and the last one gets us to the Dial Tab, where you can set up to five contacts for speed dial, characterized by name or picture attached.

In addition, you have one more menu for a fast access to the phone’s functions. It is activated by tapping the QuickBar (Home) button and consists of nine shortcuts to: 1)Landscape view; 2)Scenarios, from where you can choose preloaded display brightness levels; 3)Flashlight; 4)Task Manager; 5)SMS; 6)File Explorer; 7)Calculator; 8)Wireless Manager; 9)FM Tuner.

A customized task manager, including good finger touch control, which facilitates termination of running applications, has been added as well.



The М800 has the M-Desk menu preloaded, as the rest of the Eten models. It is activated by double tapping the QuickBar button. This software provides shortcuts to various menus of the phone, divided in four tabs: 1) Phone; 2) PDA; 3) Fun; 4) System.

The rest of the interface is standard for Windows Mobile 6 Professional phones.


PhoneBook:

The phonebook is the standard for the OS: not the best you can find on the market (hint: Symbian S60), but is neat. The number of contacts that can be added is not restricted and depends only on the memory available. When you open the phonebook all contacts are displayed as a list; each field consists of the name and the number, while a letter placed beside them indicates what the type of number it is (w – work; m – mobile, etc.). Pictures are not displayed even if there is one attached to the contact.

The line displayed at the top of the screen is a search field, which initiates a name search on entering a symbol – the more symbols you type, the more accurate the match is – it’s quite useful! Just below it, there are tabs with different letters (divided in groups of three). This way you can arrange the contacts so that the ones beginning with a given letter are displayed. These two search features are quite handy and they make finding a particular contact in the phonebook very easy. However, if you want to find an acquaintance by other field such as “company” for example, you have to use the “Search” application in the programs menu.

The fastest way to search for a name though is through the dialing screen. The virtual keyboard is visualized, together with a small call history list, once the Answer button is pressed.

By pressing the buttons, you will start imputing the digits of a possible number, but at the same time, you will search the phone book as if imputing a text by a predictive text input system. So, to call John you can press 5-6-4-6 and the matching contacts will be visualized in the list.

Things are more complicated when adding a new name: the device offers way too many capabilities, including multiple work and home numbers, but they are not arranged logically. There’s only one field for mobile number – something quite inconvenient as that’s exactly where we wanted to add multiple numbers to. The numerous address, e-mail and other fields confuse you even further – it would have been a lot easier if the most frequently used fields are highlighted in some way. Thus finding them would have been easy, eliminating the need to go through the long list.

Personal photos and ringtones can be assigned to each contact; there’s no restriction on the dimensions of the pictures but they are visualized in very small size even on an incoming call – we think they are useless. You can also add a note to each contact.


Organizer:

There are total of three alarms, which can be accessed through the home screen, by tapping on the clock tab. They can be configured for certain week days , have separate names and sounds. Overall, they are easy to use and do what they are supposed to. We are rather disappointed only that their number is limited to three.

The next tab in this menu is the clock; there is a field called Visiting next to it, which can be used as a World Clock – select another location and the phone starts using its local time. The clock has an option to be displayed on the title bar of all the menus, which is handy.

The calendar, where you can save your appointments, can be found in the Programs menu. Some of the available options are: reminder (PRIOR NOTICE 1/5/10/15/30/45 minutes, 1/2/3/4/5/6 hour/day/week), recurrence (Once, Every (same-day-of-the-week), Day (same-date) of every month, Every (same date-and-month) for every year, sensitivity (normal, personal, private, confidential). It is also possible to add attendees (required or optional) from the contacts, whose e-mail addresses have been added and to whom meeting requests will be sent.


Examining the calendar can be done by day/week/month/year/agenda and you can choose the week starting day and its duration (5,6 or 7 days). The appointments for the day are clearly shown in their time limits, so you can see your free time at a glance. This is one of the new things of WM6 compared to WM5.

You have Tasks menu, where you can add to-do items. For a given Task you can set subject, priority (normal, low, and high), start/due date, reminder (to be notified if it’s due), category (business, holiday, personal, seasonal) and write a note. The assignments can have recurrence (Once, Every (same-day-of-the-week), Day (same-date) of every month, every (same date-date-and-month) for every year and sensitivity (normal, personal, private, confidential). Examining the tasks in a list, you can easily see which of them are finished and which ones are not. The available tasks options are: sort by (status, priority, subject, start date, due date) or filter (all, recent, no categories, active, completed).


The Calculator is simple but its buttons are relatively big and can easily be pressed with а finger. Scientific calculator and unit converter are still missing.

‘Notes’ are simple notes in which you can input text by the keyboard or by hand as an image. They can be synchronized with outlook.

'Search' is an application, exploring all files of the phone. You can specify certain locations (calendar/contacts/excel/messaging/notes/etc), but the best option is All Data which will search through everything in your phone.

File Explorer is the mobile alternative of Windows Explorer seen in computers. It is used to browse the phone memory, including the system folders of the device, which feels like working on a PC.