Motorola W220 > Reviews (12)

The eyecatching W220 starts with the slick Razr, makes it a bit smaller and value engineers it down to a budget price, but retaining the high quality robust feel of so many budget flip-type phones.

The first impression is the clean mirror-finish black front panel, within a silver, pink or black surround. Normally it's plain black, but three indicators for call, text or low battery illuminate appropriately so that one glance tells you about anything you need to know.

Also visible on the sides are the power and headphone sockets, and a plastic strip rocker volume switch. The back is smooth and pleasing. Overall a good impression.

Flip it open (the motion is reassuringly solid feeling) and the keys glow a gentle blue in the flat but textured keypad style familiar from Razr and L6/L7.

The bright colour display takes up about half the area of the top, providing about six lines of text and a choice of graphical and menu themes. The screen feels robust, and six months of use has left not a mark, testiment to a sensible design. This display isn't optimised for browsing - it's web capable but too small for many purposes - but as a phone it works just fine.

Softkeys and configurable one touch menu access make the phone simple to use. Ring tone quality is excellent, the speaker and microphone work well and the phone comes with three java games and can download more. A nice bonus is the built-in FM radio, which in the usual way requires you to have the headphone plugged in and acting as an aerial.

The interface is typical for Motorola. By and large, you can find what you are looking for easily and operation is straightforward. But Moto still have a lot to learn from Nokia in this regard - it's OK, but not loveable! In particular, navigating the contact list is more of a chore than it should be. It works, but it's not optimised, is clunky if you have dozens of contacts and frankly irritating if you have hundreds.

So far, so good. And with this phone, it's so far and no further. The W220 omits the usual not-very-good phone and doesn't have MP3 capability, so if these features are important to you this wouldn't be a good choice.

Battery life is good for its class. As always, take stated lives with a big pinch of salt, but in any case you won't need to charge more often than every few days. Programmed timer for daily switch-off is a useful feature, as is an alarm that works even when the phone is off - something most but not all phones will do.

If not, than my view is that this is the best budget phone around right now for looks and quality. If you can get one for £25 or so, you'll have a true bargain.

But for all this, it's a phone to like not love, and you get the feeling that Motorola have been careful to downgrade every individual aspect of the phone to avoid it harming others in the range. I think that's the wrong way round. I mentioned the plastic volume rocker on the outside: well, that's a perfect example - the only jarring note of tacky quality in an otherwise crystal-clear exterior.

Good. Great, compared to some of the nasty and break-prone budget phones out there. And recommended, but with reservations.