I’ve come into the possession of more Motorola product in the last than I have owned in my entire life. Last friday, it was the K1 KRZR, yesterday it was the HT820 Stereo Bluetooth Headset.

I have about four hours of 10 hours of talk time on the phone, and probably 3 hours of music time on the headset.

Let’s talk about the phone, first.

First off, I have to say, I really like the phone, and I wasn’t expecting to. Other than the issue with finger prints that I bitched about the other day, I have no complaints with the phone at all. Reception and call clarity have been excellent, and battery life for my use hasn’t proven to be a problem, even though I was expecting it to be.

The phone sync’d up with my computer over Bluetooh with no problems at all in Windows (XP Pro SP2), and works fine with the same machine running Linux (Ubuntu 6.10 / Evolution), using an application called wammu, that was available through my standard apt repositories. Being that I’m a Linux User 99% of the time, this was very important to me.

There are however, a few little quirks with the phone that do bother me.

• If I delete a song from the memory card, without deleting it from the playlist, the phone completely crashes, forcing me to yank the battery to solve the problem. Pain in the Ass.
• The positioning of the charging plug still drives me batty. I prefer my Samsung’s and Nokia’s, where it is at the bottom of the phone, rather than the side.
• The software interface is a touch slow. Faster than my Nokia 6682 by far, but not nearly as responsive as my Samsung D600.
• It’s a flip. I’m still having trouble wrapping myself around using a flip phone. I’ve been a Candy Bar guy for a very long time.
• The SIM card is difficult to remove, unless I remove the TransFlash card first. This is just nitpicking, and will probably never effect someone in a real world situation.

What’s good about the phone?

• As mentioned earlier, the call clarity and reception is excellent. No complaints on either.
• Size. My favorite phone that I own, is a beat up old Nokia 3120. It’s a cheap little nothing phone, that I love because of the small size, and how simple it is to operate. I’m a simple person, who likes simple things. The K1, while a much more complicated phone, is slightly smaller than my old 3120, at least when it is closed.
• It takes my 1 gig TransFlash card with no issues at all. I’ve got 8 albums on the phone right now, that I simply dragged and dropped using Nautilus under Ubuntu 6.10. Simple simple. Mounted the phone, copied the whole album across into the proper directory, and away I went. Even keeping the songs organized by album folder, on the phone does not phase the mp3 player at all. This is a huge improvement over all of my other phones that had to have all the files in a single directory.
• It doesn’t choke on higher bitrate mp3 files. I rip everything at 320kbs, and some of the other phones we have right now choke and refuse to play files ripped at higher than 192kbs.
• It’s not locked to ringtones that I can download from my providers website. I can use any audio file I want as the ringtone. Currently, it’s the opening bass line from 46 & 2.
• It charges when I plug it into the USB Cable. My D600 does this as well, but the Motorola uses a standard Mini USB Cable, not some stupid proprietary cable like the Samsung does. This means, I can charge the phone at mom and dad’s with no issues at all.
• A2DP flat out fucking rules. I get a real life range of about 30 feet with the HT820 Stereo Headset. There is an occasional delay between switching songs using the controls on the headset, but again, that is just me nitpicking. It however, DOES slaughter the battery on the phone. Don’t expect more than about 90 minutes of play time if you stream your music over Bluetooth, that is to be expected though.
• The rest of the world can have your silly little poker games on your phones. I have Tetris.

As I said ealier, so far so good with this piece of hardware. I’ll probably use it as my primary voice device for the next half year or so (I also carry a BlackBerry 8700, that I detest as a phone, but love for it’s messaging abilities), assuming that I can get accustomed to using a flip. That’s been the strangest part so far.