The Motorola E398 is a great candybar phone. Most of my praise goes to the sound and light show it puts on. The sound quality is amazing;this phone has stereo sound with sub-woofer like vibrating bass. It’s something that I never realized I missed in a phone…

continued from Day One…

Day to Day:

The Motorola E398 is a great candybar phone. Most of my praise goes to the sound and light show it puts on. The sound quality is amazing—this phone has stereo sound with sub-woofer like vibrating bass. It’s something that I never realized I missed in a phone. The light show is something else too. Multi-colored LEDs hide behind grills on the side of the phone. Their pattern and color are determined by the “Rhythm” options on the phone. You should be aware though that the sounds and light extravaganza put on by your phone will likely annoy people around you—but it’s still fun to look at.

The user interface on the phone are pretty standard Motorola—no frills, very utilitarian, however, not very Mac-like. One great example is how Motorolas display contacts. By default, every contacts bit of information is separated as if each bit of info is a different person or business. For example, if in your Mac Address Book, person “Alex” has both work, cellphone numbers as well as an email address, on the Motorola would be listed as different Alexs, each with their own number and email address. You can have these contacts arranged by name, so you only see one Alex, which helps, but it’s not quite like having one Alex with all his info listed in one place. Of course, there’s nothing quite like one Alex, is there :-)

The camera on the E398 is VGA resolution, or a max of 640x480 pixels. This means that the photos it takes suffice for MMS or email messages that you might send to friends or post on a blog, but they’re not going to be sufficient for printing. Zooming in on the camera is not done optically, but digitally, which also results in lower resolution photos. So, the E398’s camera will not replace your digital camera. For that we’re going to need at least a 2 mega-pixel camera, and on phones those are just hitting the market. To get a feel of the quality of the camera, see the pics below of shots taken around Dupont Circle in Washington, DC.

Pulling Photos Off of your Bluetooth Enabled Cellphone to your Mac:

Because this site is all about using your Mac with your cell phone, this is a good time to explain how to pull photos off of your cell phone and onto your Mac. Because photos won’t be very big because of the low resolution of the camera on the E398, bluetooth should work fine.

The first step is deciding where you want to put your photos. If you’re the quick-and-dirty type, you might just want to put the pics on your desktop. If so, you’re going to want to use the “Browse Device” option in the bluetooth menu in your menu bar. If you’re the iLife-all-the-way type, the easiest way to do this is to use Image Capture located in your Applications folder. Step-by-step for both processes is outlined below.

Browse Device:

• First, decide where you want to put your photos on your Mac. In this example, I’m just going to put them on my desktop for later use.

• Click the bluetooth symbol in your menu bar of your Mac and select “Browse Device.” From there the Bluetooth File Exchange application will pop up asking what device you want to browse; select the E398 and click “Browse.”



• From there, you see a new window, with the folders on your E398. If you installed the removable transflash (now called microSD) card, you should see this listed as well. By default, photos taken with the E398’s camera are dropped into the “picture” folder in the “/” or root path of the phone. Double click on the “picture” folder to see a listing of the photos you’ve taken on the phone. To pull multiple photos off the E398, you can highlight and select images and click the “Get” button, which will ask you where you want to save the images, in this case, on my Desktop. After clicking “Save,” the File Exchange application will wirelessly download the photos and put them in the designated place. Done! Double clicking the images will open them in Preview.

Image Capture:

• The big advantage of using Image Capture is that you can import photos from your phone directly into iPhoto. To do this, launch Image Capture (located in your Applications folder) and click on the Devices menu and select “Browse Devices…” From there you will select your phone and click the “Connect” button. This will allow you to browse the photos on your device, and download them directly into iPhoto. Unfortunately, I discovered half way thru this how-to that Image Capture isn’t working with the E398. I know this works with other Motorola phones, so I left this here for your information.

Listening to Music on the Motorola E398:

As of July 13, 2005, automatically syncing music with the E398 and iTunes is not possible unless you hack it will unauthorized software. This may change soon as rumors indicate Apple and Motorola will have announcement soon. However, just because you can’t sync doesn’t mean you can’t put mp3s on your E398. The process is most quickly done with a USB cable:

• Attach your E398 to the Motorola USB cable and attach the USB end to your Mac. After you do, you should see a new removable drive show up in the Finder. From there, navigate to mobile/audio/ or the “audio” folder within the “mobile” folder on this new removable drive, in this picture, labeled “SANVOL.” Drag and drop mp3 files into this audio folder to your hearts content (or until your transflash is full).



• Eject the removable drive on your Mac by clicking on the symbol next to the drive in the finder. It’s now safe to disconnect the usb cable from your Mac and from the E398.

• On your phone, push in the joystick and navigate to the “Game and Apps” menu. From there, select MP3 Player, a java application. The interface to this program is straight forward and you should see the mp3s you just loaded available in the playlist. Plug in your 3/32” headphones in the top or listen to the music thru the stereo speakers on the phone.

This process of manually loading mp3s on your phone is definitely a pain, and it doesn’t even allow you to play music you’ve downloaded from iTunes or other sites. Hopefully, the rumored iTunes Mobile player will arrive soon and will fix this mess.

More details to come and a summary of my experience with the Motorola E398 on Day Three