Motorola W220 Review

Good Points
This is a very good design phone, really nice to look at.
Has a cool rubber one piece keypad (like the V3's metal one, but rubber).
Really good battery life compared to our telecom phones.
Has cool icons on front of phone to alert user to calls, texts, and low battery.
Can send/recieve picture messages.
Very thin and small for pocket. Narrower than V3, but not as thin.

Bad Points
Very slow at keeping up when texting. I get 4 letters ahead then phone gets lost.
Small built in memory ~600K which just doesn't store enough.
No camera.
Smallish screen (I believe its 128 by 128 pixels)

General Comments
This phone was released in New Zealand about 3 months ago, and I got one maybe 2 weeks after that. In NZ these phones only come in Black, or pink with mirrored front where status icons are. This phone has no external screen, but instead has 3 icons alerting user to incoming/missed calls(green phone for known caller, or orange for unknown), text/picture messages (blue envelope), and low battery (orange battery shape). When I first saw this phone I thought its design to be excellant, it was slim and narrow so fits well in a pocket, no external aerial, and inside it has a very cool 1 piece rubber keypad, with nice blue backlighting. It was quite highly priced for its features, one would be better to get a V3 as they are only a little more, but I guess that the high price reflects its a new model phone, and its price is already coming down. I then went and bought one, and initially was very impressed with what it could do for a low end phone. It can hold 250 text messages which is quite good compared to some other phones I've had. It has 3 built in games which are also good fun. One game is like a budget 2 on 2 version of worms. Call quality was very good, and battery life was also very good. But I use predictive texting and thats where this phone comes unstuck. It is very slow at keeping up what what is being entered, and I can get 4 letters ahead in less than 3 words. When this happens the phone either usually stops, or garbles up what I'm entering. The other texting problem is that you can write 5 full texts worth at once and send it as 1 large message, but each "new" text (of ~160 characters) further slows down the phone to the point it only can cope with 1 charactor entered per second. I tolerated this for a while, as otherwise its a great phone, but after 2 months I couldn't take it any longer so I bought a Motorola V3 and its so much better.

Overall this is a great looking phone, and I reckon if your not a heavy texter or speed texter than its worth buying, but if slow phones annoy you like they do me then its best avoided.