Disappointing handset, but at least it's cheap. (Motorola W375)

Member Name: mobyfiles

Product:	Motorola W375
Date:	27/09/08 (66 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap price. Nice look.

Disadvantages: Bad range of features. Prohibitive memory.

Quite a few Motorola mid-range phones have been sucked down into the budget range, either as a planned strategy or lack of market demand and the W375 is no exception. This phone, loosely styled on the successful KRZR K1, offers quite a few slimmed down features but doesn't go quite as far so it is 'no-frills'.

This phone is about as cheap as PAYG gets - about £20 will see you get one. There is a related model - the W377 which is simply an upgrade of this with a few extra features (I'll try to review this if I do manage to get my hands on one).

First impressions of the phone are good. It's actually very slim and does not have a very big footprint. It's also pretty light, too and I am aware that it is available in many different colours in case you don't like the one you get. Externally, the phone has an LCD to the outside, which does not have much use apart from to tell the time, or let you know missed calls/SMS.

Open the flip and you have a nice keypad layout with a 65K colour screen. Now, this is nothing special - the type of screens have been around for some time already. But, we have to remember that this is a budget phone. There is a camera, but only at VGA resolution (that's under 1 megapixel, really). This will only take photos suitable for MMS, not really one to take holiday snaps on.

Actually, this phone wasn't that good. I think the problem with Motorola is that they did not think this through in what they wanted to achieve with this and there are quite a few contradictions here.

The phone is pretty good to use but the battery life is not the best on this. Possibly the screen eats up quite a lot of power, but that is hardly an excuse when seeing other similar phones produce longer battery life. I found myself charging every day - I get quite nervous when the phone is only on one bar of battery.

I have never been a fan of the Motorola OS, so I might be biased, but I found this quite unresponsive. Texting is far from intuitive on it. The internal memory is a shade over 10MB, which is fine for this type of phone - and then Motorola fill up the space with stuff like games, MP3 ringtones and other memory-hungry stuff. I did not find a way to remove the games.

Therefore, having a camera on the phone is pretty redundant. If you have a lot of contacts and SMS messages stored, you might only be able to have 10 or 15 shots in VGA mode stored before you get the 'out of memory' message. Pointless. For the same reason, there is very little point in having MP3 on this, it just eats up valuable space.

The phone also contains no Bluetooth. It would be most handy, if only to send files away to make room for other stuff on the phone. But, no it does not have this - and it hardly costs the earth to put Bluetooth on the phone.

So, you can see what I mean when I say it's not clearly thought out. If I were Motorola, dumping the camera and MP3 stuff, increasing battery life and dropping the price to around £15-20 would have been a better bet, given the absense of a 'no-frills' clamshell phone. The W377 has promised to remedy a lot of the aformentioned faults, but we'll see.

Still, it's a very cheap phone. If you would like to get one, these are available on all networks apart from 3. Just don't expect too much, and even at this price level, I think there are better alternatives.

Summary: Very cheap handset, but that's about it. Should look elsewhere.

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