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The camera shoots stills at resolutions up to two megapixels. There is no flash or self portrait mirror. The latter is arguably not needed as the lens is on the front of the casing and with the phone closed the front screen performs the job of a self portrait mirror. The lens looks away from you when the clam is opened, and its view is shown on the main screen.

There is no optical zoom but an 8x digital affair. The navigation pad lets you easily fiddle with this and set effects: black and white, blue, sepia, red, green and negative or exposure control: sunny, cloudy, night indoor at home and indoor at the office as well as manually adjust with the exposure for a brighter or darker picture.
The short delay between tapping the centre of the navigation button to take a picture and the picture being shot meant I got quite a few blurred images at first.

The camera has difficulty when close to its subject, though it coped better than I expected with shots like my outdoor image. The branch in the foreground was less then 50cm from the lens, the far distant fencing about 1.5 metres, the day was windy and yet the shot is acceptable.

With the lens on the fingerprint-attracting facsia of the casing I found I needed to wipe it before shooting to ensure it could see its subject clearly rather than through a greasy haze.

You can fiddle with photos a bit after you’ve shot images, changing their brightness and contrast, rotating, mirroring, adding borders, blurring and sharpening and even cropping. You have to resize down to 300 x 400 for this, though.

The music player produces reasonable quality through the provided headset, and music continues while you do other things such as browse the Web. With the phone closed the playing track is detailed on the front screen. The player does not include any equaliser settings, and the manual says it may not play MP3 files encoded at more than 128 kbps. It didn’t baulk at the 192 kbps MP3s I threw at it, though.

I tested battery life via continuous music playback. It wasn’t possible to force the main screen to stay on – in fact it went off after just a couple of seconds.

Continuous music playback for five and three quarter hours isn’t too impressive given that the phone was not keeping its screen going during that time. I’d think a daily charge might be in order if you are a keen music fan.

Verdict

The main screen, battery life and camera aren’t as good as they could be, but the handset design is very appealing and Motorola has tried hard to make its flat numberpad more user friendly – and for this user at least, has succeeded.

I wonder if the K1 part of the name may indicate we are in for a K2 and K3. Let’s hope these aren’t just more of the same in pink!

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