Eten M810 Review

Introduction:

Nowadays, the Internet has become an integral part of the lives of many people. Everyone uses it for different purposes: news tracking, searching for various bits of information, podcasts, blogging, chatting, VoIP, etc. The Taiwanese manufacturer Eten offers a solution for the last four activities in the face of M810. Compared to the previous models, it has a radically different aura and it is equipped with a full physical QWERTY keyboard, so you can chat and blog easily.

Under the surface, we discovered a Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional OS, GPS, WiFi and 3.5G (UMTS/HSDPA) support, which will ensure that the so called “web-warriors have almost constant, high-speed access to the Internet”. Besides, the phone should also perform well as a music and video player with an option to listen to tracks directly from the “Web”.

This phone will have a non-3G variant as well, under the name Eten M750.

The package contains:

• Eten M810
• Spare stylus
• Charger
• USB Cable
• Screen protector
• Stereo headphones/handsfree
• Battery
• Leather case
• Leather strap
• Quick Start Guide
• Getting Started CD

The leather case is intended to be attached on a belt. It is fastened firmly with the clip, and in addition, you can drive your belt through it. The case will protect the phone and screen from scratches or damages.

Design:

M810’s design is similar to V900 and follows the new style of the manufacturer. In previous models, the main idea was to achieve a functional and professional appearance, and now, the designers have strived to make it much more pleasant to the eye. Eten has done a great job, therefore making the phone attractive to a larger audience. The glossy surface, covering the front and sides, contributes for that as well. In contrast to most other such devices, here, the fingerprints are very hard to notice.

The combination of rich functionality and solid make have driven the weight up to 6.3 oz (179 grams). On top of that, the weight hasn’t been well balanced when the device is opened, which leads to discomfort during continuous work.




You can compare the Eten M810 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.


On the front side, we have the 2.8” TFT display, supporting up to 65k colors. In contrast to most of the latest models of the manufacturer, which have VGA resolution, it is only QVGA (four times smaller). The picture is bright and with well-saturated colors, making it pleasant to look at. In direct sunlight, everything fades, but the good news is that the screen is still fully usable. Unfortunately, it is concave and when you have to tap an area close to the edge, you might experience some discomfort.

Below it, are located the functionality buttons, the send/end keys and the 5-way D-pad. The four buttons are small, therefore difficult to press, and the D-pad is user-friendly. The lack of shortcuts (OK and Start menu) makes operating the phone without using the touch display impossible.

On the left side, we find the volume control, the voice command button and the microSD slot. They are not easy to press either, because of their location in a depression of the surface, which characterizes both sides (left, right) of the phone. On the right side are located the power and the camera buttons. However, they protrude more and are easier to press. The reset key, which is pressed with the stylus, is between them.

The only thing on the top is the strap hole, and on the bottom, reside the microphone, the miniUSB and the stylus.


The entire back is made out of plastic, which feels like it is rubber-coated. This prevents the phone from slipping when you are holding it in your hand. In the upper part, we have the loudspeaker and the 2-megapixel camera.

The sliding mechanism is stable and creates the impression that it will last. It is easy to open single-handedly, no matter which area you press – left, middle, right. The slider reveals a full QWERTY keyboard with a blue backlight. It reminds us of the slim RAZR, with the flat surface buttons, separated only by slightly protruding lines. The last ones are very bright and that impairs the user’s ability to distinguish the symbols on the keys, and at the same time, irritate the eyes if operated continuously.




Using the QWERTY keyboard is a pain. Its keys are not organized as standard and are in three rows instead of like in M800. Besides, the “space” is located between “C” and “V”, and it has the same size as all other buttons. We noticed that the dot and the comma, which are the most frequently used punctuation marks, are missing. When you need them, you’ll have to use the FN key. In addition, the buttons lack any relief and have a very short drive, which makes it almost impossible to realize when you have pressed one. This results in many mistakes and difficulties when typing. The serious texter and the blogger audiences, which the phone actually targets, will most likely curse this keyboard.

Interface:

The software used in Eten M810 is Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional. It would have been better if it was the latest version 6.1, seen in the newly-announced models of the manufacturer. Their interface has been modified to a greater degree in order to make them more user-friendly. We hope that there will be a software update soon, which to compensate for these drawbacks.

In M810 the interface is almost the same as in M800, X800 and X600. The manufacturer relies on the same “old” personalization options with which to make operating the phone by fingers easier. The first one of them is the limited version of SPB Mobile Shell, which is a 4-icon toolbar, located in the upper part of the screen. Their number can be increased with two more at the most and you can rearrange them. However, we will review them as preset in the factory.

The first icon shows the battery status, but once selected, it activates a menu with the last 12 applications used. If you hold the stylus over each one of them however, you can “pin” the most frequently used, rearrange them and therefore, have a very useful shortcut menu. The second icon leads to World Clock and Alarms, the third one to Weather Forecast and the last one takes you to the Dial Tab where you can only add five contacts for speed dial.

Despite the SPB Shell, you also have the shortcut menu, which gives you access to some of the phone’s functions. It is activated by pressing and holding the right functional button for about 3 seconds and it consists of 9 shortcuts.

The finger-friendly additional Task manager is present as well and it is accessed via the small icon in the lower right corner.

There’s also the pre-installed M-Desk menu as in the rest of the models of the manufacturer. This software gives you access to different options divided in four tabs: 1) Phone; 2) PDA; 3) Fun; 4) System. Here however, it is pointless, because there is no shortcut to activate it and you have to access it through the main applications menu.

The rest of the software is standard for Windows Mobile 6.0.

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. 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:

From the Clock tab on the homescreen, you get access to a total of three alarms. Each one of them can be set for certain days of the week, to have own name and ringtone. Overall, using them is quite easy, but the limited number did disappoint us.

The World clock is in the same tab and the number of cities that can be shown at the same time is three as well. The alarm menu Visiting, which is next to it has a similar function. There you can only choose one destination, but you’ll be able to set the phone to use its local time.

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.

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 a 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.

Messaging:

Different message types are placed in a single menu - SMS, MMS and e-mails. There is nothing unexpected here. If you don’t want to use the hardware QWERTY (open the slider), entering text is done by one of the following touch display methods:

• Block Recognizer
• Keyboard
• Letter Recognizer
• Transcriber


According to us, the full virtual keyboard is the fastest way for text input, but the other methods can also be useful if you get used to them.

Connectivity:

Eten M810 is a quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) with a tri-band UMTS/HSDPA (850/1900/2100 MHz). These specifications make it a global phone, and the only 3G network you are not going to be able to take advantage of, is T-Mobile’s (1700 MHz).

Naturally, you have Bluetooth and WiFi at your disposal. The first one is used for pairing with accessories and short distance data transfers to other Bluetooth devices.

With WiFi, you can connect to a wireless LAN network covering your position, use it as an Internet source and view the shared information (input \\name-of-computer in Internet Explorer and you will see what is shared).

Like all other Windows Mobile phones, you need to have ActiveSync (Windows XP) or Windows Mobile Device Center (Windows Vista) installed on the computer to connect to it. The program will let you easily synchronize the phone (contacts, emails, and organizer) with Outlook.

Internet:

A phone, targeting the Internet audience is expected to be most reliable for web surfing and getting information. This however, is not the case with Eten M810. Here we have the mobile version of Internet Explorer, which is not a competition to Opera 9.5 or Safari but is more likely to fall in the “useless” class.

Its main drawbacks include incorrect page visualization (especially the larger ones); the content does not automatically rearrange itself, there’s no pan or zoom, all of which results in the need of continuous, annoying scrolling in all directions.



Overall, the browser is outdated and cannot satisfy the needs of the modern Internet user. Luckily, there are alternatives, although in beta versions (Opera Mobile 9.5, SkyFire, Deepfish).

The VoIP service keeps gaining popularity among the people.The already famous Skype application has been available for PPC now for a long time and it usually does a good job. In М810 the application is slow, but it is fully functional. We used a WiFi connection to find out if we can have a normal conversation. The only troubles we experienced were, some interruptions at times, but the overall performance was OK. By default, the loudspeaker is used for listening, but the phone comes with preset software, Skype Receiver Switch, which transfers the sound to the front earpiece. This allows you to make calls without being heard by the people around you. The idea of this application is very good, but is absolutely useless, because when it is active, the microphone is not functional.

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.

Performance:

The work speed of the M810 is truly very slow, which makes operating it annoying and unpleasant. Usually, such sluggishness is characteristic of the Eten phones, but here it is really bad. There is an irritating lag when navigating through the menus, and sometimes, in situations, which are absolutely non-problematic for other WM devices, you’ll have to wait 7-8 seconds.

The productivity test we made with SPB Benchmark confirmed that. The proven HTC TyTN II is a step in front, and HP iPAQ 614 simply crushed the Eten. Overall, working with this phone is a pain and is far behind from what the competition offers.

The main function of a phone is to give the user the ability to make calls. Here M810 performs above average. The voices you hear will be monotonous and sharp, and at times extremely unpleasant. On the other side of the line, the sound is louder, but it has the same quality.

According to the official data, the 1530 mAh battery should provide up to 6 hours of talking time and 260 hours in standby mode.

Conclusion:

With its design language, Eten M810 is definitely more attractive to most consumers, and the connectivity it offers will be appreciated by the Internet maniacs. Those however, are the only positive characteristics of the phone. If we refer to it as a Windows smartphone with a full QWERTY, it would be among the ones performing average. But for the class that the manufacturer himself has put it in, M810 performs awfully!

The Internet browser is not suitable for work, and the unhandy QWERTY will be cursed by all users, and mostly the chatters. On top of that, “the perfect music and video player” actually proved to be the standard for the OS mediocre Windows Media Player. We cannot leave out the extremely slow operating speed and the poor GPS performance, which add more negative points for M810.

If you are still wondering why we are being so negative towards this phone, we’ll say it short and clear: it doesn’t do its job. We recommend checking out Apple’s iPhone. It may lack a physical QWERTY, but writing with it is easy and quick, the browser is almost perfect and it is on a much higher level when talking about multimedia.

The reason we recommend the iPhone, is that currently, there are no WM based phones with a reliable browser, except HTC Touch Diamond. Other promising models are HTC Touch Pro and Samsung OMNIA, but we’ll have to wait until they are made available on the market.