Motorola v300 Mobile Phone (Motorola V300)

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Product:	Motorola V300
Date:	03/03/04 (860 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Features , Camera , MP3 Ringtones

Disadvantages: Buttons

Overall this is a pretty good phone, especially when one considers how much functionality is included for the price. The MP3 ringtones are pretty neat (and you can use the phone as a poor man's MP3 player since you can set it to play MP3s with the phone closed), speakerphone in general is louder than Nokias, and the rubberized exterior means I can put it on my dash and not worry about it falling off! I'm pretty satisfied with the phone, and though the camera isn't the best out there, it does include a nice slideshow feature. Motorola also improved their user interface and it's nice and responsive unlike my prior Sony Ericsson T68i. And the alarm clock gets nice and loud, it really works well.

This phone is plagued with some bugs though, with people complaining of: random restarts, random shutdowns, hangs in browser. (I bought two of the phones and haven't had these problems though.) In addition, there are little annoying bugs like the backlight takes close to a second to turn on when you open the phone, when you set a custom ringtone for a contact number, it will use that for phone calls or SMS messages from that phone number (ignoring the SMS ringtone you may have set). Worse yet are the T-Mobile annoyances: they removed the e-mail client which Motorola will include in non-T-Mobile V300s, they seem to have removed the ability to send recorded voice notes in an MMS unless you record it while your composing your MMS, and they've added links to various T-Zones features throughout the phone, which serve as nothing more than annoying advertising really.

In the end, value wins here, if the phone were priced higher, I would not have purchased it because of the annoyances above.

(Tip: if you don't like having contact entries for John's Cell, John's Home, John's Work, etc, you can set it to display just the primary contact, in this case "John" and then it'll show an icon to the right of the con
tact name. Pressing right or left will go through all the other phone numbers/email addresses for that contact. Even handier than having to click on the contact name and then scrolling to the number you want.)

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