Motorola

Two years ago I was kinda sad when I ended up with a Motorola V635 and not a RAZR as my personal phone. RAZR's were so freaking cool back then, but they generally sucked from the nerdy technical point of view. Just try running EQO on a RAZR V3 and you'll see what I mean, slow... I was really happy with my V635 when I got it. It was way better than my circa 2002 Audiovox (colour screen!) and made calls just fine. It wasn't until I got my hands on some other high end phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson that I realized just how greatly Motorola phones paled in comparison. Motorola pulled off a marketing coup with their four letter 'almost a word' naming scheme, featuring RAZR, SLVR, PEBL, KRZR, ROKR, RIZR and so on. It seems that the consumer community has gotten over the then cool RAZR form factors and voted with their dollars because Motorola's phone division isn't doing so well. Who'd a thought better qualities products would sell more?

The news today is that Motorola is actually splitting off it's phone division from the rest of its business, a move many see as protecting the successful business from the phone division's inevitable failure. I'm not really surprised by this and I don't recommend that anyone buy into the pending IPO of Motorola Mobile.

UPDATE:  Wow, didn't know it was this bad!

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

Motorola Linux phones such as the Motorola E6 and A1200/Ming have a time-of-day bug that if you set the phone time to Daylight Saving Time, any J2ME application will show the time as 1 hour behind. The reason may be that Motorola Linux phones are developed in China and China does not observe Daylight Saving Time?

Now that North America is back to Standard Time, this Motorola Linux phone bug will hibernate for the next 4 months.

Colin - EQO Founder & CTO

About a week ago (August 1, 2007), I started having problems with receiving incoming calls on my unlocked Motorola ROKR E6 mobile phone. My mobile service provider is Fido and I have an unlimited local calling service plan (City Fido) for Cdn$45 a month.

At first I thought I had mistakenly changed the call forward / call divert settings. Nope. Then I did a master reset on my ROKR E6 thinking there was a problem with the phone. Nope.

Next, I put my Fido SIM into a Nokia phone. I was able to receive incoming calls. So there is nothing wrong with the call divert settings or my Fido SIM.

I then put my Fido SIM into a Motorola E680, and also tried it on a Motorola A768 and A1200/Ming. Nope. Incoming call did not work on any of these Motorola Linux phones.

I then put a Rogers Wireless SIM into the ROKR E6. Incoming calls worked just fine. So the problem had to do with my Fido SIM in combination with a Motorola Linux phone.

To ensure that there was not a problem with my Fido SIM, I went out and purchased a replacement SIM from Fido. No luck. The new replacement Fido SIM still did not work with the ROKR E6 for incoming calls. At this point, I had no choice but to put the new SIM into a Nokia phone so that I can at least receive incoming calls.

Then something mysterious happened. This new replacement Fido SIM was empty with no contacts stored on it. The Nokia phone that I was using also had an empty address book. Yet when someone called me, the caller name showed up on the call display. That was interesting because my Fido service plan includes Caller ID service feature but I did not subscribe to caller name display service feature.

I finally called Fido customer service. Sure enough Fido started a free promotional offer for the caller name display feature on the exact date that I started having problems with receiving incoming calls on my Motorola E6. It appears that incoming calls fail for all Motorola Linux phones such as A768, A780, E680, A1200/Ming, ROKR E6 on the Fido network if calling name display feature is turned on. I had to ask Fido to do me a favor and disable the free promotional calling name display feature so that I can receive incoming calls on the ROKR E6.

Colin
EQO Founder & CTO

Recently, we've had several e-mails asking us to support new Motorola phones. Well, we've now decided to let these eager beavers become intrepid beta-testers (like the rest of the EQO community). We are also extending this opportunity to anyone else who wants to try out EQO Mobile on their Motorola RIZR Z3, KRZR K1, RAZR Maxx, or A1200 Ming. If you are already an EQO user, you can change your phone details on your account page. If you are not an EQO user, you should probably sign up. So if Santa Claus gave you a shiny new Motorola RIZR Z3, KRZR K1, RAZR Maxx, or an A1200 Ming for Christmas, try out EQO Mobile and let me know how it works out for you at peter@eqo.com.

I’ve been seeing a lot of new technology out there lately that’s all about using VoIP to save you money and guarantee you anonymity when making calls. I figured I’d try a few and share my findings with you, the world.

First up Jajah Mobile, who offer “free global calling directly from your mobile phone”, but should continue “that you have to pay for, but probably less than if you weren’t using Jajah”. I first tried the Jajah version made for the Motorola RAZR V3 on my Motorola V635, which was on the Rogers Wireless network in Canada. The two phones share all but looks so I figured it would work, but the Jajah Mobile application, in J2ME format, didn’t work on my V635 for whatever reason.

EQO has added the following phones to its supported List:

Palm:

Treo 700p

Motorola:

E1000, E1070, L2, L6, Razr V3x, V6, V8, V270, V280, V1150

Nokia:

6125, 6126, 6131, 6136, 6233, 6234, 6282

Check out the full list here!

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

We are looking for pre-beta testers to give EQO a try on a Sprint Nokia 6165i and on a Verizon Motorola RAZR V3c. Email me, chris@eqo.com, if you are interested in becoming the first person to try a non Treo phone on your network. Helpful beta testers will receive not only fame and fortune, but a free EQO T-Shirt. I look forward to hearing from you!

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

EQO 0.92.1, introducing many usability improvements, bug fixes, and new features, was released last night. This one was a bit late as a result of us running into many unexpected problems. Our development team still worked crazy hard to get this one out, cheers to them!

Some bad news first, due to some rather serious bugs EQO 0.92.1 for the Palm Treo 650 was not released. The Treo is still stuck at 0.91.1, but we are working on it and will release shortly. Sit tight Treo users, give us a few more days!

Now for some good news, 0.92.1 fixes the problem some Mac users where having where EQO wouldn’t start on their computer. Also, certain Motorola users of EQO Mobile won't be running into those pesky application errors anymore.

As for what is new in EQO 0.92.1, well a revamped UI for a starters. We've also added Unicode support for Skype Chat in many more languages. Multi-Session Chat is also added, as well as Stanby mode. For a description of what standby mode entails please see Feature of the Week #11.

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

We are looking for people to try EQO on the Motorola phones listed below:

-          L2/L6

-          V190/V191

-          V230/V235

I have been posting on the forum and listening to comments from our community members in the few weeks since EQO launched.  In response to reactions coming from the forum we at EQO have been working hard on new features and support for more phones (EQO for Mac, Motorola, Blackberry, and Palm Treo coming in the next month or two!).  We have already added support for many more countries and carriers as per the requests of many.  Like I said in my last post, we really pay attention to what is being said in the forums so feel free to give us a piece of your mind.

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist