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Review GSM-phones Motorola v300, v500, v600

Part 1. Construction, screen, keys, battery life>>>

You can access the Main Menu by pressing the Menu key which is located under the screen right in the middle. The main menu is traditionally presented with 9 icons; each of them uses service text line for definitions. You can switch the main menu’s appearance to the list mode. Then everything will be presented with lists. Half of the menu is presented with lists and half with icons (if you use the appropriate menu look). The user can customize the order of following for the icons in the main menu (or the items in list view mode). The menu doesn’t support fast number navigation, but you can setup shortcuts for almost every menu item or function. The navigational key can be assigned with various actions during the stand by mode. But that’s not all, you can also remove the PODPISI for the soft-keys if they’re annoying during the stand by mode, they will appear only when you press one of the keys. Two soft-keys can be bind to various actions as well, apart from the default ones. With such menu personalization flexibility the lack of the fast number navigation is not so noticeable.

We’d like to describe text input system before reviewing the phone’s main functions. It’s no wonder that this model supports predictive text input, and iTap technology. The current word and other possible words will be displayed in the bottom service text line when you’re inputting the text. When the predictive text input is turned off you will see all symbols bind to the pressed key instead. Everything is nice and can be comparable with Siemens phones, since they have similar feature. It’s interesting that Motorola and Siemens phones differ so much visually, but are alike in so many software aspects.

In case you use two input languages for your SMS – you can choose the language from the special menu. But that’s not all, you can also setup which type of text input to use for every Language – predictive or no. An interesting solution that allows setting up your mobile even more custom. However most of the people who use mobile phones don’t switch the text input, only a small amount of users use more than two of them.

Phone book. 1000 entries can be stored in phones memory, however only one number can be assigned to each. You can switch the way of phone book’s outlook, in that case all identical entry names (ex. John Smith) will be stored as one entry, this means that one entry can finally have more than one phone number, e-mail address etc. Âñå äåëî ëèøü â òîì îòîáðàæåíèè, êîòîðîå âû âûáðàëè. Another interesting feature comes up when you had changed the view style – you can bind custom ring tones and pictures to every number (not entry) to be used in case of an incoming call. The phone book supports Groups as well

However I have noticed a small disadvantage – when you are deleting an entry from the phone book, you will have to delete each number assigned to it separately. It’s impossible to delete them at once.

You are free to choose the style of displaying entries in the phone book: either names with assigned images, or only names, you can also personalize the entry sorting style (quick dial number, name, e-mail address). Voice dialing can be setup as well; it works fine in various conditions.

The phone book reminds the one used in Samsung phones (unlimited number of fields per name, you can enter as much as you can), on the other hand it has some obvious advantages and additional parameters (personal photo, ring tone). At the moment Motorola is the only manufacturer that offers such kind of the phone book, the others have certain limitations on one of the parameters (one photo for each name, and the lack of ability to bind it to separate numbers, the same goes for the ring tones).

Messages. The first thing that nearly shocked me is that there is no additional memory for SMS, you can only use SIM-card’s memory. That’s it. Seems that Motorola thinks that MMS will become the future standard and decides to head for it. However this phone does support EMS, but there is the very same SIM-card’s limit.

The operator has the ability to ask Motorola to increase the amount of stored SMS up to 40 (in case if there’s a special model planned to be released on the horizon). 20 of them will be stored in the phone’s memory and the other 20 will be located on the SIM-card.

Working with MMS doesn’t bring any inconvenience; everything is simple and easily understandable. The messages can be attached with pictures made by the built-in camera, sound files. The ten predefined templates are really great, be sure to check them out.

The phone has POP3/IMAP4 e-mail client, it allows watching the headers of the incoming mail and download their body as well. Only graphical files that do not exceed a certain size limit can be sent. In case you want to store some of the e-mails, you will have to use the dynamically spread memory, just like in case with MMS

WAP. The phone has WAP-browser v2.0 and its possibilities are standard so nothing special can be said. GPRS (class 10) is present, the settings are rather simple, just follow your operator’s instructions and everything will be done in a matter of minutes. There are some predefined settings for your country as well. However the MMS settings are not as easy as the GPRS ones, they may even seem too hard to understand so not every skilled user will be able to deal with them. Here is my advice, just take an existing profile, rename it and change its settings according to your operator’s ones. This is the easiest way that saves you from looking up the manual, which features a deep review of this feature.

In case you like difficulties – here is another way of setting up the MMS. Call your operator and ask them to provide settings for your model. It took me about four hours in order to realize that this is simply useless, thankfully the phone has loudspeaker so I wasn’t forced to hold the phone near my ear for this period of time. In the end I decided to bare my laziness and check out the operator’s web-site. I’ve found several settings for the previous models, and after combining them and several experiments I had finally managed to get the MMS working. I highly recommend you not to call the technical support, and do what I’ve described in the first example. On the other hand, after about 6 months since the model will go for sale, when there will be a large number of people calling and asking for the same thing this problem will be solved.

Records. The phone has a list of received calls; it includes the missed ones as well. You can also see the list of the 10 last dialed numbers; you can access it by pressing the Call button. Everything is rather simple and traditional, nothing special at all. Each entry features the date and time as well as the length.

IM – Instant Messaging. An analogue of ICQ, you may setup it up and use, however I do not think that this feature is very popular at the moment. One of the Europe’s operators plans using v300 for advertisement of Instant Messaging in its network. I wonder if this move will affect the sales rating.

Office applications. This menu features a whole bunch of office applications such as the Calculator. It’s convenient, the full digital keyboard is present on the screen, it reproduces the real keyboard perfectly. The menu features memory options and the unit converter.

Shortcuts are located in the same menu. You can create shortcuts not only for various menu sections, but for a definite wap-site as well.

Alarm clock. You can create several alarm clocks and choose a custom ring tone, name and volume, type of reoccurrence (daily, single time) for each of them. This phone was designed for continuous, that’s why entering names and titles for the alarm clocks is required. This option seemed wicked at first, so I went on naming the alarm clocks with some random letters like A, G, J, R, M etc. I’ve ended up with a huge mess of alarm clocks, so I was forced to leave only one of them. Everything became clear and useful after sorting up the titles. My final list was the following: morning, weekday, weekend, training, interview for the radio. Of course it was possible to make the appointments in the organizer, but I don’t really like marked squares in the calendar, seeing really important appointments and business that are not suitable for daily “To Do list” separately is a lot better. The alarm clocks are ideal solution for these needs; they can be activated by one key press and will warn you about the appointment. You just have to set them up once. Someone can refuse by saying that the Alarm Clocks are rather common and not really required since most of the people use them only to get up in the morning. Well, so many people so many tastes, I am really busy and sometimes it happens that I am forgetting some important meetings, so a set of Alarm Clocks will save me theoretically.

Dictaphone. You can create records from the stand by mode as well as during the talk. Dictaphone can record the whole dialogue. Maximum length for each entry – 20 seconds, however your interlocutor will hear the sounds (at first it’s zoommer, followed by short beeps with a continuous interval). Total number of records is limited only by the amount of free space.

An important feature: after the time limit is over you will hear a beep, then you have to release the record key and press it again, since the recording process doesn’t always continue to work. I couldn’t really trace this process’s pattern. Most likely this bug will get fixed in the next firmware version.

Organizer. You can view it monthly or weekly with breakdown for hours. You will see your appointments bind to a certain time of the day while viewing the calendar in the 2nd mode, it’s convenient. Each entry can be assigned with a name, start time, length (measured in hours, the minimal amount of time – 30 minutes). Warning can be set in advance. Each entry can be reoccurred, this is a big plus.

I highly recommend you setting up Bluetooth-syncrhonization for the older models. In that case you will be able to upload date from MS Outlook, which is a lot easier than entering it manually. As for the v300 – you will have to buy data cable in order to gain the sync with PC, there is no other way you can do it (IrDA is missing).

SyncML support is present, it’s made for corporative users who are in great need of synchronization with data server (something similar to remote synchronization with Desktop PC, but this time the server must be located in the network).

Games and applications. The phone supports Java, all applications that are located in this menu item are based on this technology. The number of games and their title depends on where the phone was bought. Motorola v500 featured a game called StuntMan, it’s a sort of a racing game. It might be fun for the youth, however it seemed rather boring to me. The second game is a lot better – good old Monopoly. Those who had played it’s desktop edition will not be able to resist the e-version. When I’ve tried it for the first time – I was about to go to sleep, however I managed to do it only before the sun came up. The developers managed to save the game’s original spirit, it’s really amazing. This game was the main reason for this phone to occupy my jacket’s pocket for more than a month.

Whenever there’s a Java application running you will see a coffee cup sign in the icon list, same icon is displayed in the external screen. Long hours spent in the world of Monopoly allowed me to test the phone in various modes. The incoming calls do not interrupt your game; you are free to get back to the place where you had stopped and continue from it, and however you can start a new game as well. A very interesting option that is not present in every phone.

No problems were encountered with uploading new games; everything went smooth and ran nicely. And please don’t write me e-mails containing questions like “Where can I download JAVA games?” we have a Forum for that.

Multimedia. The phone supports themes. It’s a set of wallpapers, color schemes for the menu, sounds and ring tone types. You can change the outlook of your phone almost instantly and this is really fun. New themes can be downloaded from Motorola’s website.

MotoMixer – original sound file editor that allows mixing the tracks. You can play with it from time to time; the results may come out rather unexpected and nice. However as the practice shows, these sound editors are nothing more than a toy for most of the users, only few of them take use tool seriously.

Sounds – information about all sound files located in the phone’s memory is stored here. You can check out their size, info and even listen to them. The players is similar to other Motorola’s phones, everything is clear and easy to understand.

Pictures – list of all images located in the phone’s memory. There’s a special icon near the file name. Each picture can be set as the wallpaper or screensaver. Pictures can be sorted in categories; this will make the browsing easier. A special editor is present as well, it allows putting frames, changing color scheme and using special effects. The most convenient part is that after mocking the picture it can be stored with a new name. This means that both the original and the new picture will be available for use. This may come handy in case if you want to edit the photo, and not to ruin the original.