Motorola V220 review from United States of America

Outer casing is scratched around the edges.

Motorola 'M' is missing some silver paint.

Outer LCD cover is pretty scratched, but still very usable.

Inner LCD plastic has two long scratches from something (probably from wiping face oil off the screen).

Occasionally will hang and reboot. I power cycle the phone when it happens, and have few problems with it. Has never hung on a call or anything important.

The case is pretty banged up, but no functionality is missing.

This is Motorola's entry-level 'media phone.' Media, I suppose, can be categorized as playing music, playing video, taking pictures, and viewing pictures.

As far as the audio/video department goes, it's well-stocked. It can play MPEG-4 video, MP3 audio (including ringtones) and polyphonic MIDI files.

The MIDI system is robust, having few problems with most of the MIDI files I threw at it. High polyphony is supported, though I believe the number of simultaneous MIDI channels is limited. Many notes, few channels. Pretty standard for a mobile device.

The MP3 playback would be great, if the phone had more than 1.2MB of flash memory space. As it stands, it is useful for playing the included (very bad) MP3 ringtones and not much more. MP3 ringtones are quieter than MIDI ringtones, and I'll tell you why that's bad in a moment.

Video playback is pointless. It plays, yes. Even with audio. But the screen is small and playback is choppy. And good luck fitting a video into the 1.2MB of user space on this phone. Ha!

That's it for A/V. How about the camera? In a word: bad. It's VGA, which means 640x480 pixels, or 0.3 megapixels. And since it's mounted on the top flip, with the LCD and the handset speaker, there's no room for a real lens. Pictures taken are fuzzy, with poor color and lots of flare.

Viewing pictures is better, though I haven't opted for the $30 cable and software, so I don't have my own pictures on the phone. The LCD is clear and bright. It's passive, though, so the display smears when framing a picture or moving between menus.

Menus are confusing, and this is coming from a computer geek. Options are buried in strange places, but most of the important ones are there.

As far as being a phone, this is where the V220 really falters. It's quiet. Very quiet. This is a good phone for those who don't want others to know they have a cell phone every time it rings. However, trying to hear someone while on a busy city street is next to impossible. If you have the phone on an MP3 ringtone, or in your pants pocket, you won't hear it. The vibe motor is weak, so you might not even feel the vibrate function right away. If you've got the phone in your car, and your car is quiet, you'll hear it. And it's great in that situation. However, if you've got your CD player on or your car's not so quiet, you won't hear the ringer. I have no problems hearing it in my Audi, but always miss calls in my Mitsubishi.

So, what have I missed?

Call audio quality? It's a GSM phone, so my calls all sound great.

Reception? Okay, this is complex. Inside cement buildings, the puny little antenna just can't do anything to help reception, however, I've had luck in the far north woods when friends' phones wouldn't work, mine would. In general, however, I'd have to say that the reception with this phone is pretty bad. But the antenna unscrews, so you could possibly fit a bigger and/or more powerful antenna.

Speed dial? Voice dial? Don't know. Don't use 'em.

Web access? Yes. I *do* use this. I have a data plan from my provider, and have used the WAP browser often. It works very well, and downloads things appropriately. The phone's processor is slow, so loading things takes a while. I mostly only use the WAP features to get MIDI ringtones from my Mac to the phone. I did try Google mobile a few times, and it worked as advertised.

So what's left? Oh yeah. Text input. This phone uses an intelligent word-guessing system that means you have to push fewer buttons to get the text messages you want. However, both my and my wife's phone (we got matching V220s) were set to guess words in Portuguese by default, with the #2 backup dictionary being English. I'm all for diversity, but Portuguese? I reset most of them to English, but there are separate settings for Java games, the web browser, entering phonebook names, and text messages. Yes, you have to set it for each one of those. It seems like every different text entry area has its own setting for this.

I think that's it. I've got some pictures online here:

http://www.dragoth.net/~dragoth/projects/V220-review/