Motorola A835

The A385 is quite large, it will just about fit in your pocket and the unit is quite heavy for a mobile phone. This aside it is certainly a stylish phone, sleek and stylish colouring and nice to hold.

The display quality is unfaultable, bright and an excellent colour range. The display works nicely with the two integrated cameras. The cameras take reasonable quality photographs and digital videos and even boasts digital zoom and limited controls such as exposure value and to a degree light metering. Photos and videos can be sent to others via mms, bluetooth and IRDA link. I have downloaded some videoe from my 3G provider and the playback is really quite good. Mp4 video format is supported and there is a surprising amount of space to store videos.

The battery is used up incredibly quickly, i have owned the phone for 5 days and have charged it three times, the handsfree kit seems to consume battery life rapidly.

Text messaging on the phone is one of the nicest text systems i have seen, predictive is easy to use and learns new words with ease, you can send to mutiple contacts which is a very nice feature. Texts in the inbox are listed by subject and even though there is an option to switch to sender view, this doesnt seem to work.
The phones stores a lot of SMS messages using both phone memory and SIM space, also all outgoing SMS are stored which is a handy feature.

Call quality is excellent, no hiss or inteference and i have can honestly say it is the best phone i have used for call quality .

The headset included with the phone is simply cheap and low quality, the ear-pieces don't appear to be ear shaped and fall out, the cord is irritating and the other party often find it hard to hear you. Voice dialling is not supported by the wired hands free kut included, i expected to be able to press the button on the headset and voice dial, but the voice dial button is on the handset. This seems silly as the time you are most likely to use voice dial is on hands-free.
i am soon upgrading my headset to the Bluetooth G2 which is far superior to the wired HF kit included.
Bluetooth connectivity is supported and works perfectly, i have exported my copntacts to the A385 from my old phone by bluetooth and it was seamless. IRDA is also integrated but i hav not used the feature.

A USB connection cable and PC/MAC software is supplied, to be honest the software doesnt seem to support much purpose apart from moving emails from the phone.

There is the usual mass of wallpapers, ringtones, SMS tones and themes to customize you r handset.

The extras included onthe phone are limited to a calendar and a calculator, there are no games installed on the phone when it comes out of the box.

The phone is very simple to use, you can choose between icons and list views and operation is very simple. Video calls and voice calls are one-touch, there is a one-touch button to activate the cameras too.

The information available is immense, from maps to news, weather and stiock reports. All are downloadable and download speeds are quick, installation is automatic and so far has always worked perfectly.

Overall the phone offers excellent call quality, good SMS capability and information is available at the touch of a button, it is let down by the size and lack of features but achieves its intended phone features very well. This handset was free on registering with Three Telecom, i certainly would not the pay £499 price tag for this handset and would not recommend anyone else to either.

As the new generation 3G capable phones go it is a good start.