AMOI E70: The Smartphone with RAZR Keypad

I give you the Amoi E70, the smartphone which is the candy-bar version of the legendary Motorola RAZR. If you've ever seen a RAZR, this will be a revelation to you. Why hasn't Motorola thought of that? I guess Chinese mobile phone manufacturers know what to “borrow” from phones that have huge sells across the globe, and make their own versions, clones or redesigns (in our case) and still sell incredible amounts of mobile terminals based on others’ great ideas.

This time, Amoi has done a pretty good job with its E70, which, in my opinion, functionally speaking, is just over the head of the Motorola RAZR. Just thinking that the E70 is running a Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone operating system, you can get the whole idea of what I mean by saying this. The RAZR just can't compete with the functionality added by the Microsoft mobile operating system to the Chinese phone.

Furthermore, we are talking about a tri-band GSM/GPRS, working on 900/1800/1900 Mhz networks, with wireless Bluetooth connectivity, a 2.2 inch 240x320 pixels 262k colors TFT LCD display, a 2 megapixel CMOS digital camera, with video recorder/playback/messaging, self timer and digital zoom, a media player with support for MP3/AAC/AAC+/MPEG4 multimedia file types, a miniSD memory card expansion slot and a huge package of Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 compatible applications: Microsoft Pocket Office viewers, Microsoft Pocket Internet Explorer, Microsoft Media Player 10, Microsoft Reader, PDF/PPT viewer, Microsoft Pocket Money, Microsoft ActiveSync, Direct Push Email and many others.

The single fact that makes it a sour grape is its availability only in China and, the worst thing, only in Chinese. Why doesn't the Chinese manufacturer deliver its products for us too, or at least in some other languages? I guess this is a question we will have to live with.