Motorola i730 Cell Phone Overview
The Motorola i730 is a clamshell cell phone like the i95, but it is markedly thinner, and therefore smaller and lighter. Its color screen is smaller than the one on the i95, but it has excellent color purity, and exceptional clarity in bright sunlight and outdoor conditions. The latter is one of the big drawbacks of color screens, and while I won’t say that the i730’s is a match for a monochrome screen outdoors, it certainly comes close.
The keypad is nicely laid out, but I found the keys were a bit too recessed to be really easy to press. The keypad could do with having the key tops raised slightly. Otherwise the keypad has excellent feel, and a high degree of accuracy. Oddly, this is the first Motorola phone I’ve ever encountered that puts the TALK button on the right, and the END button on the left. Motorola has been staunchly putting them the other way around since heaven-knows-when.
In terms of features, the i730 doesn’t really bring much to the party that the i95 didn’t already. However, the functionality of the phone is exceptional compared to other non-iDEN Motorola phones. This has been the case ever since Motorola switched to their current menu structure over 2 years ago.
The i730 uses polyphonic ringtones, and they are more than loud enough to hear under all but the noisiest of conditions.
RF Performance and Audio Quality
What really makes the i730 such a great cell phone is its RF and audio capabilities. One of the biggest differences between one iDEN phone another isn’t so much its RF sensitivity (since most are very similar to the next), but in the ability of the phone to reproduce good-quality audio under adverse conditions. I’ve never tested an iDEN phone with such an incredible ability to squeeze excellent audio out of extremely poor signals, and that includes the i85.
In testing we were able to get almost perfect audio out of signals with quality values (known as SQE) of as low as 18 to 20. On other iDEN phones the audio would have deteriorated so badly by that point that it wouldn’t have been worth continuing the call. The previous winner was the i85, but I’m sure that even it couldn’t match the i730 in this regard.
Another thing that I’d noticed in all of the iDEN phones tested previously was a penchant to be somewhat coarse-sounding, which I put down to the limitations of the CODEC. The i730 has the cleanest-sounding audio reproduction of any iDEN phone so far. In fact, it was so good that I couldn’t really find any fault with it. On this facet alone, I’m hoping to do a longer-term test of the i730 to make sure I’m not imagining things.
Tonal balance has also been a big variable in previous iDEN phones. The i85 was rather tinny and sharp-sounding, while the i90 was a bit muddy-sounding. The i730 is well balanced, and although it does exhibit some boominess and a bit of shrillness at times, it is otherwise the nicest of the iDEN models. Compared directly to my Nokia 6310i on Fido however, it falls a bit short, but it’s still better sounding that any CDMA phone I’ve tested.
Earpiece volume is adequate under most circumstances, but it could really do with being a bit louder. Under severely noisy conditions you wish you had more overhead. It would benefit greatly from a volume boosting feature such as that you find on my Nokia GSM phones.
Outgoing sound quality is very good, and the phone possesses one of the most competent active noise suppression features I’ve ever encountered. It is capable of knocking out some of the most aggressive background noises without damaging the user’s voice in the least. The big problem with passive noise suppression (such as that implemented in the EVRC CODE on CDMA) is that it cannot accurately remove noise without damaging the desired audio.
We made some test recordings while sitting in acar with the radio progressively turned up to its maximum volume. At the maximum setting it was necessary for us to shout at one another in order to talk (so you should have some idea of how loud that is). In the sample recordings the radio could only be faintly heard in the background, as though he had it turned down low. It couldn’t even be detected until the volume had been cranked up considerably. My friend has also called me from the highway, and I had no way of knowing he wasn’t in a quiet room at the time. The feature is breathtaking in its ability to tame the background.
The speakerphone feature is also very good. I fall short of calling it excellent because of two issues. First, the speaker is located on the bottom of the phone, and this makes it less comfortable to use. Second, the speaker volume isn’t nearly as loud as the i85, and the speaker itself is subject to sympathetic vibrations at high volumes. Nonetheless, the speakerphone feature can actually be used in a moving car with little difficulty. It’s certainly a better speakerphone than any I’ve tested on non-iDEN phones.
Even at $500, the i730 is far and away the best iDEN model I’ve yet encountered. If you have decided that iDEN (Telus in Canada or Nextel in the US) is the way to go, you really must consider getting this phone. It will give the best performance, and the nicest audio of any other models (based on those I’ve tested).
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