Motorola MPx200 Review

After more than six months of being unhappy with my mobile phone and service, I’ve finally replaced it. Last Monday when phone number portability went into effect I ordered a Motorola MPx200 Smartphone from Amazon.

I’d been looking at the Motorola for a few weeks and I liked the features. The phone runs the Windows Smartphone OS, basically a modified version of Windows CE. It comes with a desktop cradle that you can use to charge your phone through your computer’s USB port as well as sync your contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes with Outlook.

The retail price of the phone is about $300 with service activation. AT&T has a $50 rebate when you activate the phone, and Amazon has the phone for $250 and offers a $120 mail in rebate, bringing the price of the phone to $80.

Buying through Amazon was a bit of a hassle. Even though I purchased activation and gave them all my information, the phone arrived without any account information and upon calling AT&T I discovered that they had no record of an account for me. After two attempts at activating over the phone with AT&T I discovered that in order to port my phone number from my previous carrier, they were going to have to give me a new SIM. Rather than wait for one to be mailed to me, I made a trip to a local AT&T store and went through the process of activating the phone for the fourth time. The manager of the AT&T store was pleasant enough and gave me a $30 car charger to make up for the problems I’d had getting service started.

The porting process was simple and painless. I gave AT&T the account information from my previous carrier and my phone number was moved over and my previous account canceled automatically. I started the porting process at about 3pm the day before Thanksgiving and at 2pm Saturday the process was complete. In the meantime, I could make calls from the new phone, but incoming calls rang to the old phone.

There are a few things that could be done better on the Smartphone OS side. The Outlook integration only synchronizes your primary contacts, calendar, tasks, and inbox. If you want to sync a different calendar folder, you’re out of luck. If you use Outlook as an IMAP client, your email isn’t stored in the default Inbox, so the Smartphone doesn’t sync it. I’d imagine that someone will create a third-party sync conduit that supports this. Suggestions for alternate sync products or phone email clients are welcome.

The other thing that I find irritating is that there is no way to exit most programs on the phone. If I fire up the calendar, it keeps running until I turn off the phone or open the task manager and kill the process. The calendar (and most other apps) has no Quit or Exit command that I can find. Any suggestions on that would be helpful as well.

There are a couple of small things that are easily improved. For instance, the included earpiece and in-ear headphones (for the built-in MP3 player) are poorly designed. They don’t fit the ear very well. But you can easily buy an aftermarket set that works better. Someone even has instructions for converting a pair of nice Koss earphones for use as a headset. The earphone/headset jack has a little plastic cover over it that makes it a pain to quickly plug in a headset, but that’s easily fixed by a quick snip with a pair of wire cutters.

The next version of the phone is rumored to have a built in camera, be smaller and lighter, and have Bluetooth. It should come out sometime next spring.