Motorola V150
Discontinued 23rd January 2004
The Motorola V150 is a sort of antidote
to the feature packed handsets that are coming out at
the moment, in that it's a simple, elegant phone that
still has enough features to go around.
The V150 is competing in a difficult
part of the market, up against other phones that are
typically given away free with even the most basic contracts,
so the question is, how many useful features can you
fit in without making the phone too expensive?
The first thing to notice is that it's
a continuation of the classic clamshell design, and
common styling cues can be seen that date all the way
back to the original small clamshell, the Motorola StarTac.
At 83.5 x 42 x 26.5mm and 75 grams,
the V150 is very compact and lightweight - smaller than
most other clamshell phones. The internal display is
just 96x65 pixels in 4,000 colours which makes it smaller
than most colour phones, typically now 128x128 pixels
in 65,000 colours. But never mind, the display was never
going to sell the V150 anyway, because that's not the
point.
There's no digital camera on the V150, no
Bluetooth support, no infra-red, no Java, an the FM
radio is an external option. There's a clock but no
alarm. It's only a dual-band GSM 900/1800
phone, and not tri- or quad-band. However, it does come with WAP, GPRS,
and USB connectivity, plus polyphonic ringtones, three
games, predictive text and vibrating alert, so in our
view it keeps the most useful features in a phone and
gets rid of those things that are less used.
On most networks, talktime should be
over four hours with about 12 days standby time, which
is pretty good for a phone this small.
Our verdict? The V150 isn't the world's
most exciting phone, but it's quite pretty, compact
and useful, and probably carries all the features that
most people ever need.
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