Eten M810 Review

Camera:

Camera wise, the mediocre performance is typical for the Windows smartphones. This is valid for M810 as well. Its camera is equipped with LED flash and macro focus.

The interface starts for about 3 seconds in landscape mode. There are a few indicators and shortcut icons that appear on the view-finder, but they are not finger-friendly. The Settings menu has been designed very well in this aspect. Shooting and storing takes a long 9-10 seconds and you have to be very patient. In addition, after pressing the camera button, you have to keep still for the next 2-3 seconds or you’ll get a blurry image.



The results are very bad even in a bright daylight. The colors are slightly unsaturated and are well reproduced as a whole. However, the detail level is horrible. The pictures look like they have been processed through a filter with a pastel effect. Because of the powerful noise reduction, not only the finest details are not present but most of them as well and everything is blurry. The darker it gets, the worse the results are and the weak flash doesn’t help at all.



A camcorder is also present, giving you the option to record videos in QVGA (320x240), QCIF (176x144) and Sub-QCIF (128x96) resolutions in 3gp or MPG4 format. Since the frame rate is very low, the quality of the clips is bad too.

Eten M810 sample video at 320x240 pixels resolution.


Multimedia:

The manufacturer claims that M810 “performs as a perfect music and video player”. After such a statement, we expected an individual music program, competitive to the best applications available on the market, but unfortunately, you’ll be only able to take advantage of the standard Windows Media Player. It has the same interface with not even new skins added.

The supported formats are MP3, WMA and WAV. After refreshing the file library, all supported types are found, and they can be added to playlists. This function is not well implemented and organizing them is quite hard. Songs can be viewed by artist, album and genre. Files on the phone’s memory and the ones on the card are separated.

The buttons (next/previous, play/pause, etc.) are small and inconvenient during both Music and Video playback. When audio files are played, the video window is still displayed, which is a lapse as it only takes up place on your screen. You can have these problems solved by adding new skins for the Media Player or by installing another player.

HTC for example, equips its phones with a separate audio player, which is much more finger-friendly.


The video player is far from being perfect and it cannot play high-quality videos. We recommend converting the clips to MPEG4, using the h.263 codec and a bitrate lower than 512 Kbps with no more than 25 fps. If you exceed those values, the videos will be skipping in full screen mode. These results however, are not “perfect for enjoying videos” as claimed by the manufacturer.

Via the Streaming player, you will be able to watch videos directly from the Internet. It has a simple interface similar to that of Windows Media Player. Nevertheless, here the buttons are also small and not finger-friendly. We played a few videos from Youtube.com and were happy with the results. Unfortunately, we didn’t have HSDPA coverage and had to use EDGE so the picture was somewhat slow. You could not be able to play the file selected if the carrier or the WiFi provider has closed the port needed.


The phone has a built-in FM tuner as well. This is a nice old-school addition to the media player, which helps for music on the go and can also bring you the news in audio format without the need of complicated new advanced technologies like internet streaming.

The interface is very colorful and looks attractive. The buttons are well sized and easy to press. You can easily save your favorite bands and we are happy to see that there is no dumb limit of 10 stations for example and you can save 50 bands for three locations, or total of 150 bands. We are very happy with it and used it with pleasure.

We recommend not to use the loudspeaker for listening to music, because it performs poorly. However, the earpieces included in the package will provide a loud, good-quality sound.


Software:

It's a pity that the RAM is still 64MB and the internal memory is 256, which is the same as the M600+. Internal capacity can be expanded through the microSD card slot placed on the bottom of the phone.

WM for PPC provides unlimited capabilities for installing software. The only restrictions are the memory available and the hardware of the phone. The first problem is solved without any difficulties by getting a memory card as there are microSD cards with capacity of up to several GBs. Every PPC comes with programs that are modified, “pocket” versions of known PC applications. Such programs are the mobile versions of (Microsoft) Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Explorer, Media Player, etc. Many more could be downloaded from third party sources.


There are numerous programs created for this platform, almost as many as for PC. The most popular are the various utilities for personalizing the PPC, multimedia players, file explorers, Instant Messengers, etc.


GPS:

The M810 comes with a built in GPS receiver and the latest generation SIRF III chipset. The SIRF III architecture allows the equivalent of 200,000 correlations, in contrast to the older ones which used sequential search process and allowed a few hundred to a few thousand only. This increases the GPS sensitivity and allows it to work in many indoor environments, through urban canyons, and under dense foliage. SIRF III chipset supports both WAAS in the US or EGNOS systems in Europe for even better accuracy.

Using the Satellite Data Update software will help the GPS to process data faster. This application uses Internet traffic to download the latest data regarding the satellite positioning around the planet, which should greatly decrease the time needed to determine your position.

However, M810’s cold start takes about 6-7 minutes. This is more than the usual 4-5 minutes maximum. After a hot start, the localization should be almost immediate (about 5 seconds), but the Eten needed 15-20 seconds, and even more in some cases. When used in a car, the GPS of the M810 was constantly losing the signal. In contrast, we also had a TyTN II with us and it had no problems whatsoever.

Each navigation software offers different interface and functionality, and since E-TEN does not come with anything preloaded, we won’t go into great details about it. The important thing is that the phone's display is adequately large and bright, and offers pleasant map viewing in most conditions, except in bright direct sunlight.