Motorola W7 Active Edition

Available now
11th May 2009

Aimed at markets in Asia and Latin America, the Motorola W7 Active Edition is one of only a small handful of GSM devices to be announced by Motorola this year. However, there is no indication that the W7 will be sold in Europe or North America, which demonstrates Motorola's continuing retreat from these important markets.

The Motorola W7's key selling feature is the built-in accelerometer. This allows users to use hand gestures, flicks and taps to control the handset's functions. Motorola gives an example of setting the favourite application as the media player, two shakes of the phone will start the player and flicking the handset left or right will jump between tracks. Other applications use gesture control too, and the accelerometer also works with the W7's Personal Trainer application, and it can be used in gaming too.

These gesture controls do make the W7 a little bit cool, although at its heart this is a fairly simple but useful 3G device with a 2.2" 240 x 320 pixel display, 2 megapixel main camera, video calling camera, microSD expandable memory, stereo Bluetooth, a multimedia player and FM radio. There's no 3.5G support on the W7, but it does come in three different WCDMA / UMTS variants to suit local markets.

The design of the Motorola W7 is the sort of thing that will polarise opinions. We actually rather like it - there's a nod to classic Motorola designs of the past combined with something fresh. Motorola say that there are two colours available, Licorice (in other words: black and silver) and colour scheme called "Alpine White" which is a combination of white, black and yellow.

The Motorola W7 is designed to provide entertainment on the go, and the music player can support most major playback formats. It works with an optional stereo Bluetooth headset, which will stop wires snagging while exercising.

Talktime on 3G is about 3.5 hours, with up to 12 days standby time. If you use the Motorola W7 on GSM only then you can get a useful 8 hours talktime out of the device.

Although initially we were a bit disappointed in the technical specifications of the W7, the gesture control does seem to be worth a look, and it certainly makes an interesting alternative to all those touchscreen phones that we have been seeing lately.

Motorola say that the W7 should be available during the second quarter of 2009, or in other words.. sometime in the next 7 weeks or so.

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