Motorola V220

...what drew me to the Motorola V220. This tidy little flip-phone certainly looks the part. In its closed state, it stands at only just over 3 inches in height, with attractive silver casing, an LCD screen with time display and neatly placed camera lens encircled by a little disc of chrome, making it a very stylish looking little chap indeed! Flip this phone open and there is a compact colour screen, generous sized keypad with illuminated symbols and ...
...come across since buying the Motorola V220, the picture quality simply doesn’t compare. However, in good light and with the subject close by, some of the photos I have taken are of acceptable quality. One feature I do like is that you can alter the colour of the photos by setting the camera to ‘black and white’, ‘antique’, ‘colour’ or add a ‘bluish’, ‘reddish’ or ‘greenish’ tint. The phone does come equipped with an auto-timer however, which is a ... more

Now call me shallow, but I like good-looking things. Cars, clothes, jewellery, men. Oh, and mobile phones! And (like the phone whore I am!) looks are exactly what drew me to the Motorola V220. This tidy little flip-phone certainly looks the part. In its closed state, it stands at only just over 3 inches in height, with attractive silver casing, an LCD screen with time display and neatly placed camera lens encircled by a little disc of chrome, making it a very stylish looking little chap indeed! Flip this phone open and there is a compact colour screen, generous sized keypad with illuminated symbols and a five way navigation joystick pad with a centrally placed camera selector button. Nice!

Unfortunately, as is very often the case in life, looks can be deceptive, and I have to say this phone is a little disappointing. Ok so the shop assistant let me have a little play with it before I took it home, but how much can you really find out about a phone in those few uncomfortable minutes at the counter of a near empty mobile phone outlet whilst the assistant stares apathetically on?! Despite still knowing nothing of its functionality for my few moments of fumbling about, I purchased this phone anyway, refusing to believe that something that looked so stylish could fail to live up to my expectations! Will I ever learn my lesson?!

The key features of this mobile are the afore mentioned colour screen, camera, video playback (but importantly not recording), WAP connectivity (as well as data, cables and dongles - whatever they may be! I looked it up, but it‘s all French to me! If you‘re expecting technical expertise in this review, stop reading now!), polyphonic ringtones and arcade-style games. The phone also offers the usual range of tools such as calculator, calander, alarm function as well as IM messaging facility and a ‘Foto FunPack’ to allow you to ‘personalise’ (or vandalise) the pictures you have taken (this basically means you can add silly hats and noses etc. Whoopee, so glad I got that as standard!). This phone also offers the ‘MotoMixer’ facility which allows you to create and mix your own ringtones. This would be an attractive feature I think, if only I could work out how to use it! The idea is to be able to take any base tune and add sounds, change the tempo, mix samples etc, enabling you to completely personalise your ringtone. However, my phone gives the choice of exactly one base tune (a chirpy little number called ‘Blue Planet’!) and nothing more! There appears to be no facility to add additional sounds or tracks! The phone also, incidentally comes with limited instructions, so neither have I been able to consult the guide to figure this feature out further! Additionally, there is a multi-media facility within the text options which allows you to send animated messages complete with polyphonic ditties! They include common-place messages such as ‘Happy Birthday’ , ‘Thank You’, ‘I love you’ etc. However the animations and accompanying tunes rather bizarrely fail to represent anything related to the message they are supposed to convey! It makes them really amusing (my sister and I actually cried laughing at these), but they are pretty near useless really.

Looking at some of these features in closer detail, it doesn’t get much better, I’m afraid. The colour screen is clear and the contrast sharp (and adjustable), but could do with being a little bigger. It is little over 1.3 inches square, which for a camera phone is quite skimpy. The quality of the photos taken with this phone also leave a lot to be desired. Although you can adjust the set-up to allow for different lighting conditions, change the resolution and exposure, zoom in or out, the pictures tend to be of varying quality and these features seem to have little impact on remedying this. I think the size of the screen contributes to this problem, as if the images were larger, they may appear clearer. Compared to some camera phones I have come across since buying the Motorola V220, the picture quality simply doesn’t compare. However, in good light and with the subject close by, some of the photos I have taken are of acceptable quality. One feature I do like is that you can alter the colour of the photos by setting the camera to ‘black and white’, ‘antique’, ‘colour’ or add a ‘bluish’, ‘reddish’ or ‘greenish’ tint. The phone does come equipped with an auto-timer however, which is a useful feature.

The video playback facility on this phone is not a feature I’ve used a lot. I was led to believe that the phone had an inbuilt video recorder, but this was mis-selling on behalf of the retailer (to whom I should, but haven’t complained). However the playback quality is pretty good (although again, a larger screen would have made it better) and this is an excellent feature if you have a friend with a multimedia phone who likes to send video attachments! My friend’s younger brother abuses this facility on a regular basis and sends her all manner of unsavoury clips! It’s also useful for playing back downloaded video images from the internet.

The web browser on this phone is pretty speedy by comparison to anything I’ve used in the past, so if internet connectivity is important to you, then this phone would probably suit. However, I am by no means an expert in this area, and it is a feature that again I do not use often, usually only venturing onto the web to download some dodgy, sub-standard ringtone from the O2 site! I currently have a hilarious easy-listening style version of Blur’s ‘Song 2’ (one of my favourite songs) that’s so bad it’s good!

As for the usual mobile phone features, I can’t really complain. Texting can be done in standard form or I-TAP (predictive) and supports multimedia attachments. Incidentally, a standard text on this phone is 160 characters long (very important for those of us who choose to rant on a bit!). There is facility to save drafts of your messages too and sent messages are also automatically saved to an outbox. This might sound like an obvious point, but some friends have complained, with other phones, of having to manually ‘save’ texts that they do not want to lose after sending. I personally like to keep track of my texts and therefore appreciate this feature. The memory capacity is also pretty good with the phone holding in the region of 50 messages between the inbox, outbox and draft-box, before it prompts you to start deleting.

The ringtones that the phone comes equipped with (53 different alerts including simple rings, alarm sounds, and polyphonic tunes) are better than selections I have experienced in the past. There are a few cheesy numbers in there, and a few pointless alarm sounds, but on the whole they’re not too embarrassing! The phone can also be set to silent mode, vibrate or vibrate and ring. There is also facility to have different ringtones/alarms for different messages or callers too. For example a text message alert can be different to a voicemail alert, or your best friend or partner can be assigned their own ringtone aside from the standard ring for other callers. The phone can also be set to answer automatically on being flipped open, or at the touch of a key instead if you prefer to vet calls! If you are so predisposed (and I am!) the LCD display on the front of this phone is a handy way to know who is calling before you flip the phone open. I have found, however that this facility does not always work. Even with numbers stored in my phonebook the Motorola V220 doesn’t always recognise them (especially landline numbers for some reason) and displays ‘caller unknown’ or ‘private number’. Ever so slightly frustrating.

This phone is however functional in the sense that making and receiving calls is pretty straight forward. The phone has voice recognition technology, which means you can add a voice tag to each entry in your phonebook. All you need to so is press the little button on the side of the phone and say the name of the person you want to call and the Motorola V220 will do the rest. If (like me) you feel a little silly talking to your phone, then it is easy to either key dial the number directly or else select the name from your phonebook and press the green (for go) soft key. By pressing the green soft key alone, you are presented with a list of the 10 most recent calls you have made, and so this is a useful short cut to people you chat to regularly. The ease of call making is probably one of the better features of this phone.

The Motorola V220 (for those of you who are interested) comes with JavaPowered games, ‘Hungry Fish’ and ‘Ope it Out’ being the two included as standard. The fish game is pretty addictive (the aim being to eat as many smaller fish as you can, and avoid becoming a meal for a fish bigger than you!) whilst ‘Ope it Out’ I’m yet to figure out (it’s a sort of snake game in which you need to uncover parts of the screen to reveal a picture. Or something. Like I care!). The phone has facility to download further games if you wish.

As for battery performance, this phone is not terribly good, but I have found this to generally be the case with Motorolas. The battery recharges in about 2-3 hours, but if the phone is switched on all day and in regular use, lasts for only 24-48 hours! I tend to have my phone turned off during working hours, and it is used for occasional texting in the evenings. With this degree of usage, the battery is still going strong after 3 days and maybe only beginning to flag by the 4th day, but if I use it to make a lot of calls (eg locating friends on a night out, calling taxis etc) I’m lucky to get 2 days of talktime before it needs recharging. This could definitely be stronger.

So aside from a few other not particularly unique or interesting features, that’s the Motorola V220. I’ve been using this phone for a little over 9 months and find that generally it suits my needs, but I would probably use the main features more frequently had they been of better standard. I’m now looking to upgrade a.s.a.p to something with better technology (despite my previous technophobe claims!). One final point; if you’re not used to Motorola logic, you may find this phone a little difficult to navigate. I personally have had few problems, but I know of some dedicated Nokia users who simply cannot fathom the Motorola menus and option paths. I would recommend that you take a little longer over your in-shop play-about than I did to ensure that this phone is as compatible with your needs as you expect it to be.

So it seems perhaps substance is everything after all: looks can carry you only so far. Hence I've renamed my phone David, after Mr Becks himself!

But, think this pretty boy and me may be parting company soon!

Thanks for reading. 

...less