However Motorola Australia kindly loaned us an A925, which, while we were unable to connect to the 3 network, we took through its paces on our local Vodafone network.

The first impression of the A925 is its size, being about a third taller than the Sony Ericsson P900 although it is almost the same width and depth. This additional size translates almost directly to the weight difference between the two devices with the A925 weighing in at 201g while our P900 is 156g. Comparisons with the Sony Ericsson P900 are almost inevitable for every facet of the A925, as Sony Ericsson's P series, being the first UIQ phones, set a benchmark. However such comparisons are somewhat unfair when it comes to physical size because of the current differences in hardware required for 3G handsets like the A925.

The larger size of the A925 is also in part due to a different approach to the user interface and the inclusion of a rotating camera that allows for both snapshots and video calls.

The user interface involves buttons above and below the display. Above the display there are two keys, one marked with a single dot and the other double dots. The single dot key activates the application menus which can then be navigated with the scroll key, while the two dot button has no role in normal use but when the A925 is used horizontally for games play both buttons can be used to control game actions. Below the display is a five-way navigation and select key. There are four further buttons around the navigation key, below it, the hang up and call buttons (the hang up button also doubles as the on/off key) and above it a favorite shortcut key, which defaults to the home page, and web browser key. Then finally on the right hand side of the A925 are speaker, volume and voice dial buttons, the voice dial button also opens the voice recorder if held down.

It is interesting that the A925 does not include a hardware button short cut to the camera. The lack of a keyboard is not really noticeable, as calling is easy from the phone application, particularly given that the A925's screen seems reasonably resistant to finger prints.

The UIQ interface has been customized for 3 with unique application icons, however the standard UIQ applications, such as Calendar, To Do, Contacts would be entirely familiar to a P900 owner, and the range of custom applications, camera, picture viewer and the audio player, are also similar in function, if not in features.

Users have the ability to add wallpaper to the desktop screen and themes to the phone application (but not the whole UIQ interface).

There are however two applications which won't be familiar to a P900 owner.

The first is the home page. This screen provides access to key 3 services, gives a summary of communications and activities, and includes three application shortcuts. The first three service shortcuts take the user to 3's information and news service plus a "what's new" summary. Below them is a snapshot of the current status of emails, voicemails, videomails, MMS, SMS and appointments. Finally the three application shortcuts give access to the video player, camera and music player. Each element of the Home Screen is user customizable.

The second unfamiliar application is the Desktop Suite which is used to activate and deactivate the connection to a PC. It is unclear why this mechanism has been used, all other Symbian OS phones, to our knowledge, detect connections automatically; we can only think it is a power saving feature.

The PC desktop software is familiar in layout to the Nokia PC Suite rather than Sony Ericsson's and provides the ability to synchronize calendar, to do's, contacts and emails as well as perform back-ups and restores. We kept the A925 in sync with Outlook for the week we had it and it performed well with no obvious problems. It even seemed to do a better job of synchronizing To Do's than the Sony Ericsson suite (which in our experience sometimes duplicates items).

We did most of our synchronization over the USB cable supplied. While the A925 ships with a desktop sync/charge cradle one was not available with the review phone. The desktop cradle is definitely a better option as the USB cable uses the same slot as the charger so using the cable means it is not possible to use USB while charging the phone. The A925 also has Bluetooth and Infrared capabilities, and both worked effectively with our desktop PC and other UIQ and Series 60 phones. There is also a nice touch in that you can permanently access the Bluetooth setting from the status panel at the bottom of the screen, rather than having to turn it on via the Control Panel.

The Symbian OS was selected by 3 for the A925 because of its multimedia capabilities so the video and camera applications are of particular interest. Both are simple and straight forward, but they don't provide for the same range of controls, such as indoor, outdoor or night, that are common on other imaging phones. The quality of the viewfinder is about the best we have seen to date providing a crisp clean image (and is not done full justice by the screen shot below).

The finished results from the stills camera were good (given the VGA resolution) but seemed to suffer from the lack of control to compensate for the lighting conditions, as can be seen in the blue cast on the outdoor shots below. However indoor shots worked well and all pictures were of an acceptable quality, given current camera phone standards.

A925

P900

The video also worked well and was noticeably less grainy ? for the same prerecorded files - than say the player on the P900, even when using the full screen mode. The same was also true for video shot from the phone. However the video recorder is only able to record 12 or 60 second sequences, which is probably appropriate for most uses, but the standard is moving towards allowing recordings limited only by device memory.

Note that these screen shots do not provide an accurate representation of the quality of video playback.

Another facet of the multimedia options is the Music player which provides clear and crisp reproduction of MP3 through the stereo headset. Playback using the built-in speaker is acceptable, again given the limitations you would expect on a small speaker.

Finally we have the Web browser. It is very similar to the original Sony Ericsson browser, web pages are rendered in full and, as there appears to be no zoom function, are difficult to use because of the scrolling required to read all but the narrowest of columns. However once again the browser is primarily designed for use with 3's tailored services and probably performs well with them. However we understand 3 has opened browsing for their subscribers so they can access any web site (originally 3 offered only a closed environment) and as such the A925 is crying out for an implementation of the Opera or Access browsers.

Text entry is an interesting point of differentiation with the A925. The A925 does not give the user a choice of text entry, keyboard or handwriting recognition, when they enter text, rather the option has to be selected from the control panel preferences. While this may seem to be a drawback the handwriting recognition on the A925 is so good it's unlikely you will want to use the keyboard.

The handwriting recognition is done in an application window rather than using the whole screen as on the P900.

Text entry is made by writing in one of the two panels. This allows quite fast "writing" because text can be written in sequence, jumping from one panel to the other. Also as text is written the most likely letters recognized by the system are displayed above the entry panels which helps reduce errors. In addition to this there is a predictive option which displays a list of likely words based on the letters entered which can further speed up text entry.

Finally it is worth mentioning that the A925 is an open phone and users are able to load software onto it. While we are assured there is a range of applications available on the 3 network there is not much software generally available, mainly because software designed for the P800 or P900 needs to be tweaked to load on the A925, and as 3 original UIQ phone, the A920, was locked developers have not been rushing to make the necessary changes. There are a few applications available on Handango, including the very useful Remote P800 from Mobileways which we used to create the screen shots used in this review. Hopefully other software will become available in the near future.

It is probably unfair to judge the A925 without being able to connect to 3's network as it was designed specifically for the range of 3G enabled media services 3 offers, but we have to. Overall the A925 is a commendable implementation of UIQ and it works effectively as a phone. The multimedia features worked well and provided the best on-phone experience we have seen to date with excellent playback quality. The A925's size will be a detraction for many but is not unusual for a 3G phone with similar features. Perhaps the biggest disappointment about the A925, given the range of first class UIQ applications available today, is the lack of readily available software.

Web: 3

SymbianOne would like to thank Jan Ole Suhr of Mobileways for making a copy of Remote P800 available to create the screenshots in this review.