Skip to main content

Motorola A3100 Feels Two Years Old

Motorola A3100 Feels Two Years Old

Motorola’s new A3100 all-touch-screen smartphone in a nutshell:

Guy next to me: “So what do you make of this thing?”
Me: “Eh, I’m not really a Windows Mobile guy.”
Guy next to me: “Who is?”

With Apple iPhone OS, Google Android, and now Palm WebOS competing in the smartphone space, it’s hard to believe that any company is still hacking up Windows Mobile phones, but Motorola is still trying to put a fresh face on the operating system equivalent of Britney Spears. (It’s overstayed its welcome a bit.)

The A3100 felt dated in every way in person. From the lack of an accelerometer for automatic switching from portrait to landscape mode (who presses a button for that anymore?) to its lame and unresponsive resistive touch screen, there wasn’t a lot to like.

The big news: Motorola has worked Windows Mobile 6.1 over with its own “carousel,” interface, but like most other attempts at dressing up the OS, this one can’t compensate for the massive shortcomings of Windows Mobile in every other arena. It simply adds a series of home screens that can be thumbed through with a swipe of the finger. Default categories like weather and RSS can’t be changed, and they barely improve anything to begin with. The virtual QWERTY keyboard is also Motorola’s own, and supposedly compensates for “fat-fingered typing” with predictive text, but felt far inferior to other options in the testing we did.

Ultimately, the A3100 felt like a huge anachronism, a phone that should have debuted at CES 2007 and still probably wouldn’t have made much of a splash if it did. The company’s promised Android phones can’t come soon enough.

Editors' Recommendations

Nick Mokey
As Digital Trends’ Managing Editor, Nick Mokey oversees an editorial team delivering definitive reviews, enlightening…
I used two of the year’s oddest tech gadgets so you don’t have to
The open Nokia 5710 XpressAudio and Huawei Watch Buds

If you’re intent on not keeping your true wireless earbuds in a normal charging case, and want to hide them inside a different gadget, now is your time. The Huawei Watch Buds is a smartwatch with a pair of true wireless headphones inside, and the Nokia 5710 XpressAudio is a 4G phone that stores a pair of earbuds in the back.

It’s a bizarre niche that I’m surprised contains two products. I’ve used them, so it's my duty to report that both are a bit silly — and I don’t want to use any more of them, thank you very much. However, for the few people out there thinking they want to buy one, this is what they're like. For everyone else, you get to marvel at two of the oddest tech products seen in a while.
Phone or smartwatch?

Read more
Apple Watch comes to rescue for 81-year-old man just weeks after he bought it
The Apple Watch SE 2 with Nike Bounce watch face.

Apple has been pushing the health-detection features of the Apple Watch pretty hard for years, and for one 81-year-old man, they may have just saved him from a precarious situation. There is a laundry list of health sensors packed into Apple Watches — from things like blood oxygen monitors to atrial fibrillation detection — but it was the fall-detection feature that was able to help a Minnesotan last month.

On October 22, Dennis Nikolai went to change the oil in his snow blower before winter rolls around, but in doing so, slipped in his chair and fell onto his driveway. The 81-year-old usually walks with a cane (according to local news outlet Kare 11) and wasn't able to get up on his own without it. With his family not around and his phone out of reach, there were seemingly no options on how to get help — until his recently purchased Apple Watch turned on saying that it detected a potential fall and asked if he needed assistance.

Read more
My new Apple Watch Series 8 already feels old — and that’s great
An Apple Watch Series 8 with the screen turned on.

Taken as a whole, the Apple Watch is an impressive piece of technology. It remains one of the best smartwatches out there, and it’s by far the most practical option for iPhone owners.

Each year, the Apple Watch gains small improvements that Apple undoubtedly hopes will be enough to draw new customers into the fold. However, these year-over-year improvements aren’t enough for most current Apple Watch owners to justify upgrading to a newer model.

Read more