While on a short-term assignment in Asia, I purchased Motorola's first attempt at a tri-band phone. That phone was a L7089, however this phone, the Timeport 280 is a good attempt to address the L7089's bugs.

The 280 offers voice activated dialing (just press a button, say the name you recorded, and the phone will dial the number), a 500 phone number phone book, ability to store 500 calendar entries, a voice recorder to quickly record voice notes.

The 280 is also very light, at about 4 ounces! It is a little larger than the newer 8000 series Nokia phones, but I have yet to see one of them available in a tri-band.

One big disappointment about the L7089 was the complete lack of support by Motorola for IRda connection to Windows 2000 (and now Windows XP). This phone also does not support 2000/XP out of the box, but they claim you can buy additional software. I haven't tried that yet. I've also heard that the IRda support to other devices with this phone is poor. I don't understand why Motorola doesn't properly address this issue by making a phone that fully supports IRda with all typical operating systems. Support for Windows 2000 and the Palm OS should not be a afterthought!

Overall, a good phone, if you need a tri-band. Otherwise, I personally prefer the Nokia models. The menu on those is much simpler, and they have much smaller models as well.



Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 150