The Best Smartphone you may never see

Sometimes you get to try a product that stands out in your mind. It might be because it’s really good or because there’s something very unusual about it. Motorola’s A780 smartphone stands out because it’s not only really good, but it’s also very unusual in a number of ways.

First of all, it’s nicely balanced. This is one smartphone that feels great in your hand. By my simple measurements it’s 4.25 by 2 by 0.875 inches and weighs just shy of 5 ounces.

It also comes loaded with features: The A780 is a quad-band, GSM world phone for use on the 850, 900, 1,800 and 1,900 MHz bands. For data, it operates on GPRS and the somewhat speedier EDGE network.

There’s a 312 MHz CPU inside along with 48 MB of internal memory. The phone also supports the unbelievably tiny TransFlash cards (think in terms of a pinky fingernail that can hold up to 256 MB) and USB mass storage. On the back of the phone is a 1.3 mega pixel camera with 8x digital zoom. It handles 1280 by 1024 pixel stills and 176 by 144 pixel video (2 hours continuous).

A document viewer supports Adobe PDF, Microsoft® Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats, with Real Player on hand to support pretty much every media format you can think of: MP3, WMA, RealAudio, MIDI, WAV, AAC, AMR, RealVideo, MPEG4, H.263 and video streaming.

There’s Bluetooth, and Java, and for alphabet soup fans this phone also supports MMS, SMS, WAP, WML, xHTML, GPPRS, POP3, SMTP and IMAP4. It also handles voice commands (Digit Dial, SMS text to speech, Command Recognition) and has a speakerphone function. Other software includes the Opera Web browser, a calendar, a world clock and alarm, file management programs — the list goes on.

Depending on how much you use your phone and all its features the standard lithium-ion battery will provide 3-6 hours of talk time and 110-180 hours of standby.