Motorola V3

Motorola V3

This phone was purchased by myself and my boyfriend for Christmas 2006. I had the silver model and my boyfriend had the black model. They were purchased from the T-Mobile website for £149 each.
On seeing the phones we were very pleased as they are stylish, light in weight and easy to use. The phone has the following features:

• Bluetooth
• WAP
• Camera - 2MP
• Large colour screen
• Polyphonic ringtones
• Vibrating alert
• Voice dialling
• Speakerphone
• Picture messaging

You can store up to 1,000 entries in the phonebook and create a shortcut for this on your main screen, along with 3 others. I find it useful having the phonebook, calendar, calculator and quickdial memory as my shortcuts. These are accessed by pressing the arrow buttons on the keypad. As I don't use Bluetooth or WAP services I can't really comment on them. The camera is pretty average for a mobile, and you can store quite a number of photos on the phone. However, if you do have large amount of photos you will not be able to have many ringtones as I have found the memory to be pretty poor. Without any photos I am only able to store 2 full songs. If you have MP3 Pro software on your PC, I found it useful to chop music that I like into very small ringtones e.g. a few lines of the chorus, in order to have more choice on my phone. You can allocate a different ringtone for each person in your phonebook, but as the memory is poor this function is pretty useless.
Even though the screen is large and in colour, if you are outdoors, especially when it is sunny, you will not be able to see the screen at all. This means, that if you are taken photos outdoors you have to guess if you are pointing the camera in the right direction and you have to wait until you get indoors to see the photos that have been taken.
This phone is advertised as having a vibrating alert. However, if you have this phone on vibrate mode and its in your pocket, the vibrate is so weak that you can't feel it. I have missed many calls because of this.
The voice dialling is pretty good, and after you have saved the name of the person the phone is able to recognise what you are saying very easily and it dials instantly.
The speakerphone is considerably good, and when in use callers can be heard quite clearly.
What I find good about this phone is that if you have a missed call then the phone will beep every 2-3 minutes until the missed call is viewed. However, even though our phones are not a year old yet, this function on my boyfriend's phone has broken. Whenever his phone rings, when its answered or if it's missed, the phone tells him that he has 8 missed calls. Also, the calendar acts as an organiser so that you are able to set reminders with an alarm.
If you view this phone on the Carphone Warehouse website, you will see that the phone is advertised with 288 hours standby time and 7 hours of talktime. This is strongly not the case. I have to charge the phone every day, and if you make calls throughout the day that amount to longer than 30 mins, the battery will be red and will need to be charged. If you don't make any calls at all, then you will usually get around 2 days battery life before it turns red.
All in all I was very disappointed with this phone, and would not recommend it.