| Review of the Motorola i530 |
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The Motorola i530 can best be thought of as a stripped i730, though it does come in a ruggedized shell that can supposedly withstand much more abuse than the i730. The phone is very similar to the i730 in many ways, but it lacks quite a few of that phone’s advanced features. Except for those missing features the phone is so much like the i730 that you might do well to read my i730 review first. Last Updated: 14-Jul-2004 |
Before reading this review, please read Some Thoughts on Phone Reviewing.
General
Let’s begin by covering what the i530 doesn’t have, beginning with an external display. For some an external display is nothing more than an interesting extravagance that is also prone to damage. Leaving off the external display was probably as much a concession to the ruggedized concept as it was a money-saving effort.
However, because the phone doesn’t
have the external display you can’t scroll through your last-calls list and dial
the phone without opening it (as you can with the i730). Fortunately the i530
does support the 1-touch PTT feature, which allows you to program the PTT button
to contact either the last Direct Connect number that you talked with, or
to a fixed Direct Connect number that you select.
The internal display of the i530 is strictly black & white, and it’s smaller.
This means the display can’t fit as much text as the i730, but for people who
find color displays difficult to read, the i530 is refreshingly clear and
readable. My friend Leonard, who loaned me the phone, said that for his eyes the
monochrome display was much better. In addition to having just a black & white
display, the i530 doesn’t support multiple font sizes. You get just one size.
The i530 doesn’t have Java support, which means that you can’t load up all those
great applications the way you can on the i730. This includes the My Location
Demo applet, which provides some genuinely useful capabilities to the
built-in GPS receiver. The i530 has an accessible GPS receiver too, but its
display options are quite limited by comparison.
The i530 doesn’t have Profiles. I was rather shocked to learn this, as
the Profiles feature has been on virtually every other iDEN phone over the last
few years. Its absence is, in my mind, a horrible mistake on Motorola’s part.
This means that the i530’s various ringers, volume settings, etc, must be edited
individually any time you wish to alter them.
The i530 does not support voice-activated dialing, nor does it have
a voice recorder. This isn’t a huge omission for most people, since I’ll wager
that few people actually use it. However, being able to record what your caller
says is a very useful feature that once you’ve used it, you’re glad you have it.
I did notice that these two features can be downloaded from the Motorola web
page in the US (for a price). That means the phone is quite capable of
supporting voice functions, but doesn't provide them in the native firmware.
The i530 doesn’t allow you to customize the keypad or alter the order of the
menu items. I could live without the re-ordered menu, but not being able to
assign your own commonly-used functions to the various keys is a bit hard to
live without for me. However, the i530 is clearly aimed at people who use their
iDEN phones as a tool of business, and they probably don’t do things that are
radically different from the default functions provided on each of the keys.
Perhaps it was just an omission on the part of Telus, but the i530 does not come
with a belt clip. The Telus web page does mention a plastic swivel clip
available as a $25 option, so at least one is available if you like the style of
clip that Motorola makes (and I certainly do).
Finally the i530 doesn’t include the Datebook. I use this feature frequently on
my i730 to remind myself of things I need to do, places I have to go, and
meetings I need to attend. I suppose this could be construed as an advanced
feature, and as such you would really expect to find it on a base model like the
i530.
Is there anything that the i530 has that the i730 does not? Well, aside from the
ruggedized housing (which is slightly bigger than the i730 housing) there is one
small thing that i530 does have. On the top of the phone, between the two
buttons found there, is a status light. Many people felt that this was a sad
oversight in the design of the i730, and so I’m sure many people will be very
pleased with this.
Beyond these differences the i530 is very much like the i730. The external
buttons are not only in the exact same places, but they’re also the same size
and shape. The main keypad is also the same, though the i530 lacks the OK button
in the middle of the 4-way cursor keys. They i530 keypad has a different feel,
but in some ways it is a better-designed pad than the i730’s. The “press” of the
keys is a little shorter, but they seem to be more positive (at least compared
to my i730).
The ruggedized housing comes in black or yellow. In the case of the yellow
version there is still a large band of black on the bottom 2/3rds of the phone’s
exterior, which is made of a soft rubbery plastic. I personally liked the black
model better, but the yellow one (which I tested) was still a good-looking
phone, though some may find it ugly. It depends on your viewpoint.
The i530 uses the same battery as the i730, but its monochrome display is likely
to use up less battery power, which may well result in longer standby time. I
wasn’t able to do any real battery durability comparisons, and so this is only
conjecture.
RF
Performance and Audio Quality
The RF performance of the i530 is
indistinguishable from the i730. I took the 2 phones to Westdale Mall in
Mississauga where the Mike signal weakens substantially (to an RSSI of around
-110 dBm in many locations). The SQE drops below 10, and this is a great place
to see if there is any real difference between the two phones. I noted virtually
identical RSSI and SQE readings on both phones, and test calls revealed the same
overall call quality.
The earpiece opening on the i530 is a slightly different design than that of the
i730, and subsequently it is easier to find the sweet spot. That makes the i530
a friendlier phone to use, in my opinion. The ruggedized housing also makes the
phone feel much more solid, and so in this regard the i530 is a definite winner.
However, the overall earpiece sound quality, tonal balance, and volume level are
virtually identical to the i730.
The speaker on the two phones sounds so much the same that when I switched from
one to the other (as I’d done with the i830 recently) I heard practically no
difference in volume, tonal balance, or clarity. The speaker grills look the
same, but in fact the i730 grill is slightly larger.
Outgoing sound quality is pretty much the same on both models when using them in
handset mode. Oddly there is a rather detectable difference when using
speakerphone mode. During my tests I found that the i530 seems to pick up more
background noise and less voice, or it didn’t do such a good job of suppressing
the background noise, I wasn’t sure which. The end result was a noisier and less
distinct experience for the person on the far end, though the outgoing sound
quality in speakerphone mode was still very good.
The difference in hands-free microphone performance might be explained away by
the design of the housing. In the i730 there is a grill on the top of the phone
that allows sound to pass through the housing to the microphone. The i530
doesn’t have this grill, and it seems to rely on the sound making it to the
microphone through rather indirect means. As noted however, the difference isn’t
that great, but it can be demonstrated in back-to-back tests.
All of the RF and audio similarities lend credence to the theory that both the
i530 and the i730 use the same circuitboard, microphone, earpiece, and speaker.
I wasn’t about to disassemble the phones to find out, but it’s a good bet. This
obviously leads some people to wonder if i730 firmware could be flashed onto an
i530 to get some of the missing features back. I rather doubt this can be done,
since the higher-resolution color display of the i730 is clearly not compatible
with the lower-resolution monochrome display of the i530. It’s also quite
possible that the i530 doesn’t have the necessary memory to support Java or the
voice recorder.
The i530 sells for $100 less than the i730 at Telus. Saving $100 means giving up
a number of nice features, but many of these features are often not used enough
to justify their cost. The only one that would have been nice to have kept was
the Profiles. Nonetheless, the i530 still stands as worthy of your consideration
because of it lower price, because of its ruggedized housing, and because it
still has all of the stellar RF and audio qualities of the i730. With any luck
it won’t suffer from the same number out-of-the-box failures as the i730, though
both phones are built in China, and probably at the same assembly plant.
