Motorola C350, never gone (Motorola C350)

Member Name: Dr. Mengele

Product:	Motorola C350
Date:	31/10/06 (102 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Light, fancy-yet-professional looking, long battery life, 2MB memory, polyphonic

Disadvantages: Display sometimes unfriendly for eyes, lazy processor, cannot store sms in it's memory

I have been using the Motorola C350 for 2 years straight now and it has NEVER let me down. It's an extremely reliable phone and has a whole bunch of features compared to it's low price.

Now here's the up's:
- 4096 colour CSTN display with pretty vivid colours and contrast control
- 2MB of memory for image/midi file storage; this is an enormous size, a lot more than you'll ever need since the files you'll use are very small
- supports animated GIFs for use as screensaver or background; for background they will display as still image only
- nice colour themes
- supports SMS chat, using a portion of the phone's memory for this, rather than the SIM's memory, in which you may want to save other messages.
- mini USB connectivity, so all you need is an USB cable, unlike other phones that need expensive data cables
- in spite of the fact that there's no external antenna, this phone has an extremely sensitive receiver that will allow you to be in touch, regardless where you are. so far i haven't been able to find a location where it does not receive signal, either in town or hundreds of miles away, or even while visiting a cave in a mountain.
- low power consumption, equipped with 650mAh (i think so, there's a "650" followed by chinese stuff) it's able to work for a full week on standby, and maximum 4 days in case of normal use.
- stylish bright blue light for the keypad along with semi-transparent keys give it a very pretty aspect especially in dark conditions
- the printing on the keys never wears in case of normal use
- overall solid construction and casing, as far as i've seen, able to absorb repeated hits without any after-effects(i dropped mine more times than i can count)
- very small size and lightweight

The downs are few:
- the display has the pixels too far apart, and that tires the user's eyes quickly, and that can be fixed somewhat by setting the contrast lower
- it's processing power is not sufficient so there's always that feeling that the phone is "lazy" in whatever it does, especially since the keys give you that "click" feeling when you press them and you can notice how slow the phone responds. This is not a big problem, at least for me.
- the phone does not store messages in it's memory, which is the major annoyance since with older SIMs you'll only be able to store 10 messages.
- the memory used for storing messages in the "draft" folder is volatile, and the messages will not survive any disconnection of the battery, not even a short one.
- the SMS chat feature only allows 70 characters per message... that's obviously wrong (or it's a software bug) since you'll pay 2 SMS to communicate the equivalent content of just one
- as with all Motorola phones, if the battery level drops temporarily for whatever reason, the indicator behaves accordingly, but even if the battery regains it's initial power rapidly, the indicator does not go back up. This can cause the impression that the battery is low when it's really not, and will cause you to charge it prematurely, thus shortening it's lifespan.

Overall, this phone is excellent if you need just that: a phone, nothing more. I myself am the type that prefers to have a separate camera and mp3 player rather than to have a fancy phone with those features built in.

Summary: Excellent choice if you're looking for functionality and no super-mega-cool features.

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