Motorola have kept relatively quiet about the A830, but did recently show it off to journalists and it may become available as one of the launch phones for the Hutchinson 3G network in the UK. In fact we think that the A830 may be the long rumoured Paragon phone that Motorola have be known to be working on for some time.
But there's a problem some sources seem to think that the A830 may be a MS Smartphone powered phone. This would of course be a real shocker given Motorola firm position within the Symbian camp. However this speculation is simply untrue. The truth is that the A830 is a Symbian phone sporting a new user interface that is directly descended from Pearl (anyone remember that?!). That's to say the A830 is a Series 60 category like phone, but uses on of the 4 new UI's that are known to be due out of the Symbian camp soon.
You can see some pictures of the phone (along with some screenshots) here, and if you notice they have an uncanny resemblance to the Pearl UI that was first seen in a technology preview type images from Symbian (look particuarly at the font). You can see a few Pearl screenshots from the old part of this site here. I think that Motorola have taken the Pearl UI designed by Symbian and tweaked it for their own uses. It certainly makes sense that at least one of the new UI's (of four) should be Pearl like.
The specs of the phone would seem to confirm the basis of an argument for this as a Symbian phone:
[list][*]Weight: 157g[*]Dimensions: 135x53x24,2mm[*]Supported networks: GSM 900/DCS1800/PCS1900 & UMTS[*]Display: 176x220Pixel, 4096 colors[*]Integrated camera (one model with, one without) & Sd or MultiMedia Card[*]UMTS Downlink 384 kbit/s
UMTS Uplink 128 kbit/s
UMTS multi call/session (parallel transmission of several services)[*]WAP - version 2.0[*]GPRS (Multislotclass 8 (4+1))[*]MMS[*]Interfaces: Infrared one, Bluetooth, serial, USB[*]E-Mail-Client, Java support, MP3-Player, Videoplayer[/list:u]
These are all part of Symbian OS, noticeable the inclusion of bluetooth, Java and MMS especially suggest that this is defientley not a Microsoft OS phone as some have suggested (as if the the screenshot evidence was not not compelling).
Below there's one final comparison we'd liek to make. An image of the new phone, and the Symbian Pearl phone prototype / example image. Judge for yoursleves.
The one question that remains is when we see or laern more, and the answer to that is less clear, but with the A830 going through SyncML Fest 7 over the summer we're fairly sure that it's ready to go. It may be waiting on 3G from Hutchinson and when that is coming is anyone's guess.
There's one final conufsion point I want to address - why did Motorola recently liscense / announce co-operation on UIQ with Sony Ericsson? The answer to that lies in Paragon 2 which is a Symbian UIQ phone, but that's not due until time next year.
Thanks to the posters who commented on the first version of this article i was made aware of the recent announcement of the Siemens U10, this appears to be an indentical phone to the Motorola A830. I've included an image and some additional info / spcs below:
[list][*]Picture & melody messaging (EMS)[*]Voice Dialing (up to 10 user voice tags)[*]Enhanced PIM (calendar, phone & address book)[*]Sync of calendar entries and contacts with MS OutlookTM[*]Predictive text entry [*]Slot for MultiMediaCardsTM
- Wallpapers, screen savers & ringing tones
- Video and audio files[*]Bluetooth, USB, Infrared interfaces[*]Silent Alert[*]Mobile Internet Access[/list:u]
The one thing is that I would expect them to tell us which OS it runs on - they don't! But there is certainly circumstantial evidence pointing towards Symbian. One of the commentes also gave a link to the keynote by Motorola as this years developer conference at which they said a version of the A830 would run Symbian. Confusing or what? Anyone able to shed some more light on this?
UPDATE: (Thanks to efarb for pointing out this wasn't clear) This is speculation. I don't know. I'm highlighting something that interested me, and looked from some of the evidence like it could be a Symbian phone. I gave it my opinion. Sorry I didn't make this clear. Thats why the title was a question. From the comments and responses to the post it looks like it may be powered by a propietary OS. If someone could tell us more, especially an expanation for the quote from the Symbian dev conference I'd be grateful.