he new Motorola L7089 GSM phone is an international traveler and a laptop companion. It works equally well in Cambridge, Chile, and Calcutta - as well as in Chilmark, Martha's Vineyard.
The phone is extremely lightweight, yet it gets an impressive 75 hours of standby time or 230 minutes of talk time. The phone even has a voice memo recorder, allowing you to record up to three minutes of speech. What's more, it comes with a CD-ROM of software that allows you to edit its built-in phone book and even synchronize the phone list with your Yahoo Address book.
Motorola's L7089 runs on the GSM standard, one of three major standards for digital phones in the United States. The dominant standard outside the United States, GSM is now gaining acceptance in this country. It offers many advanced features, such as a smart card that contains your account information, wireless data, and integrated messaging.
But despite all of the bells and whistles, I found many aspects of the L7089 poorly designed and hard to use. And while OmniPoint has excellent GSM coverage in some areas, such as Martha's Vineyard and downtown Boston, GSM service is inexplicably absent in other areas.
Weighing just 4 ounces, the L7089 is one of the lightest wireless phones that I have ever used. The L7089 slides easily into a shirt or inside coat pocket - the ideal place to keep this phone, which has a vibrating telephone ringer.
Unfortunately, because this is a stick phone, there is nothing to protect the keypad from accidental key presses. One day I put the phone into the side pocket of my backpack; for the rest of the day, I heard a constant tone as I walked around the city. The side of my backpack was pressing the phone's big menu button, which made the phone emit the noise. This was tremendously annoying, but even after reading the phone's 98-page manual, I could find no way to turn the tone off.
A 98-page manual for a cell phone might sound excessive, but in the case of the L7089 the manual is too brief.
This phone is filled with features, and they are all very complicated to use. For example, the phone has 64 different menu settings. It has two phone books - one that is stored inside the phone itself and a second that is stored inside a smart card that fits underneath the battery. According to the instruction manual, you can even assign ''voice tags'' to entries in your address book so that you can dial by voice. I was never able to get that feature to work. I also found it extremely tedious to program new phone numbers into the phone book from the phone's keypad.
Instead of using the phone's keyboard, you can also enter phone numbers on your laptop. The L7089 comes with a copy of TrueSync from Starfish. This lets you keep a list of names, addresses and phone numbers on your laptop computer and then download them into your phone. You can also synchronize between your laptop, phone, Palm, and even a Web-based service like Yahoo Address Book.
The L7089 doesn't come with a cable to connect it to your desktop computer. Instead, the TrueSync software relies on a connection through the phone's infrared port. Practically all laptops have infrared ports, but few desktops are similarly equipped. This limits the use of the Starfish software. I was frustrated that the phone kept turning off its infrared port while I was trying to get the thing to work. I can't understand why the port isn't left activated all the time.
And alas, even when I could get the synchronization process to work, it doesn't work well, since the GSM phone book is tremendously limited. For example, a person's name in the phone book can only be nine letters long, and a typical smart card only has room for a few dozen entries at most. Try to synchronize this with even a modestly filled Palm, and you'll run out of space.
It's sad that Motorola has done such a bad job with this phone's user interface - especially when you consider that there are other phones with excellent user interfaces already on the market. Consider the SprintPCS TouchPoint, my favorite cellular phone today. After you place a call, you have the option of putting the number that you just dialed into your phone book. Likewise, after a call is received, you can take the number (captured by Caller ID) and save it.
Sprint also distributes software that you can use to the phone book. But unlike the Starfish software, the TouchPoint software allows you to control almost every aspect of the TouchPoint telephone. And since the software was created specifically for the TouchPoint, it understands the phone's limitations. The Starfish software will invite you to type long names and addresses into your list of contacts, even though it can't transfer this information into the L7089. The TouchPoint software doesn't have these kinds of problems.
Sprint's service is thin and spotty in many regions of Boston and the United States in general. The company has been going for maximum coverage, rather than maximum quality.
Service from OmniPoint, meanwhile, is dense: If you can pick up the signal, it's generally quite good. On the other hand, OmniPoint is not a national provider, and there are many locations in the United States where GSM coverage is unavailable. The most important area in the GSM desert is Chicago, where the local GSM carrier went bankrupt several years ago; expect GSM service to start in Chicago later this year or in early 2001.
Overall, this L-Series phone is a cute little phone if you need its many features - and if you can live with its deficiencies.
Technology columnist Simson Garfinkel can be reached at http://chat.simson.net/
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