The company I work for recently decided to get a bunch of the new Motorola MPx220 SmartPhones per the suggestion of one of my co-workers who had owned one for a while and liked it.  At first, I didn’t want to give-up my boring, simple Sanyo phone because it worked well as a phone… something that seems rare these days with mobile phones.

My first impression of the MPx220 was “Wow!”  It’s a camera, it’s a PDA, it’s an MP3 player, it’s a video recorder, and last but definitely least, it’s a phone.  I must say that I really like the phone’s ability to sync with our Microsoft Exchange email server.  It’s great being able to pull-out my entire calendar, contact list, or even email pretty much where ever I am.  It was also very nice to not have to type-in all sorts of names and phone numbers like I did on my previous phones.

I find the user interface pretty easy to use and well laid-out.  Considering all the things this phone does, it must’ve been quite a task to design a user friendly UI.  In addition, seems like there are quite a few free downloads out there to help you design your own UI if you so choose.

I haven’t had any time to tinker with the Windows Mobile 2003 OS as of yet, and I probably won’t… I don’t want to break it!  It does look like many others are tinkering though… I’ve seen various forum posts of people trying to adjust speaker volume issues and the like by editing the phone’s registry.

One simply feature that I love (in addition to the Exchange syncing) is that the phone has the ability to automatically switch between a regular sound profile and a meeting sound profile if there is something scheduled in your calendar.  In other words, if you have an 8:00 AM meeting in your Outlook calendar and have the sound ‘profile’ set to ‘automatic’, the phone will automatically change to the ‘meeting profile’ at 8:00 AM.  The meeting profile is set to ‘vibrate’ by default, but you could change that to no ring or a quite ring if you want.

Now for the bad part.  For all the cool features this phone has, the one thing it seems it’s not good at is being a phone!  On my second phone call, the person I was calling couldn’t hear anything I was saying and hung-up.  After doing some research online, many people have problems with the microphone not working (amongst many other problems.)  Most seem to say that restarting the phone fixes this… but who wants to restart their phone daily?  I found that if I quick switch to speakerphone, I can still talk to the person on the other line, but that’s not an acceptable solution to me.   Hopefully this won’t become an ongoing problem.

Overall, if this phone is a sign of things to come, I’m pretty impressed.  As the technology improves, it’ll sure be nice to not have to carry a mini camera, Palm Pilot, and a phone!  However, if you have a very low tolerance for things not working as they should, don’t get one yet or you’ll go nuts :)