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| Amp'd Hollywood/Motorola E816 The Amp'd Hollywood/Motorola E816 puts the youth-oriented carrier's best face forward. |
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| Written by Sascha Segan - PC Magazine If you're going to get Amp'd, go Hollywood. The Amp'd Hollywood (also known as the Motorola E816) puts Amp'd's best foot forward, but the MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) hasn't yet followed through on its promises of kick-butt content. And, like Verizon, its parent network, Amp'd has unfortunately crippled the Bluetooth on its phones. Amp'd runs on Verizon's physical network, but charges less money per month for more minutes. The E816 is a reboot of the Motorola E815, one of Verizon's best phones, and is even better than the Verizon version. The E815 and E816 both share the best reception we've ever seen from a Verizon phone, plus great sound quality through the earpiece, microphone, and speaker. VoiceSignal's top-notch, no-training voice-command software caps an excellent calling experience. The E816 is also a great-looking phone, all in black with soft plastic edges. The backlit black keys are large, elegant, and easy to press, and the whole color scheme goes well with Amp'd's black-and-blue user interface. The phone comes with a good pair of earbuds for listening to music on Hollywood's music player, which supports MP3, AAC, and WMA files (including files downloaded from Amp'd's music store, the cheapest in the industry at 99 cents per song). The 1.3-megapixel CMOS camera is mediocre: It takes photos that are reasonably sharp but have washed-out colors. It saves them on the included 128MB thumbnail-sized MicroSD card, which fits into a slot on the top of the phone. Starting in May or June, the E816 will support Amp'd's push-to-talk system with a free download. Battery life, at 5 hours 10 minutes of talk time, is stellar. Unfortunately, like on the Verizon E815, the Hollywood's Bluetooth is crippled—it supports headsets and Apple's iSync software, but not file transfers. Fortunately, you can use the MicroSD card to transfer music and pictures on and off your phone. But the Bluetooth issue shows Amp'd's challenge: breaking out of the traditional carrier-control mindset.— Continue Reading Amp'd's Challenge Amp'd does many things well. It's much cheaper than Verizon, with big buckets of minutes and even affordable unlimited-use plans. It has a fun, slick, animated user interface and a well-priced online music store. And it put a full Web browser on every phone, though it doesn't support multimedia. In June, Amp'd is introducing a prepaid plan, the first prepaid EV-DO service in the U.S. That's cool. Tethering, the connections needed to use phones as PC modems, is also "on its roadmap," according to Amp'd representatives. (There are no plans for an e-mail client on their phones, though: Webmail through the full HTML Web browsers on its handsets will have to be enough, Amp'd says.) But Amp'd just can't break free of the "walled garden" attitude that plagues U.S. cellular carriers. Face it: The real "amped" lifestyle is happening outside the carrier walls, generated by ordinary guys on YouTube and MySpace, edited by Fark.com and discussed on dozens of smaller sites whose URLs we're not going to admit we know. It has audio, video, words, and, yes, porn. It's happening too fast for walled gardens, content contracts or carrier decks. To be "amped" in 2006 requires an openness and reaction speed that no carrier is willing to adopt—not even Amp'd. Amp'd's deck of content has plenty of categories, but many are nearly empty. There are a bunch of iFilm viral videos, but there's only one show under "Amp'd Exclusives," one game under "EA Games," and none of the super-popular Namco games. For some subscription areas, such as ABC and Logo TV clips, there's no way of previewing the content before subscribing. Once again, Amp'd told me it's in the midst of ramping up content. EA and Namco games are coming soon, and Amp'd will boost its music store to 650,000 tracks by mid-May. Amp'd will find its demographic perilously squeezed later this year with the arrival of Helio, a new carrier from Sky Dayton, the billionaire founder of EarthLink. Helio originally positioned itself as the "geek" carrier, but at a meeting in April, Dayton described a strategy much closer to that of Amp'd, with similar content and an exclusive MySpace client. Hey Amp'd guys—it's time to break out the Red Bull and start thinking outside the box. Amp'd really has two phones, the Amp'd Jet/Kyocera KX18 and the new Hollywood. (A third, the Kyocera Angel, is just the Jet painted white.) The $149 Hollywood is superior, with a bigger screen, a better camera, and slightly better phone reception. It's a great all-around phone. The best argument for Amp'd (and the Hollywood) is if you want Verizon reception for less money, but I hope Amp'd's continued content and service efforts will amp up its appeal. Compare the mobile phones mentioned above, and others, side by side.
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