Motorola ST7868W

The Motorola StarTac 7868w is the best cellphone ever built....

I love this phone!!! It is the best one that I have used. I have had it now for almost 2 years and have had no problems with it. It is the perfect phone I have always looked for.

Good size and weight, for an American-market phone. The LCD panel is quite readable, and the battery life is good. Keypad lights up, quite necessarily. Automatic power save mode is nice, because coverage is intermittant everywhere I sit for a while, except in my car. Its phonebook can hold 396 entries: 99 slots with four entries each.

The keypad is nearly impossible to use without looking at it. The numeric keys are almost the same size as the function keys. I commonly hang up when trying to press # during a call to voicemail, because the SEND key is right below it. It's also fairly hard to feel if you've pressed a button or not, especially with cold hands. About 5% of the time I press a button, it doesn't take. If I'm not watching, I end up dialing some useless number. This feature is great for expanding your social circle.

All three side buttons are also the same size. It's hard to become familiar, and easy to fumble after you are familiar.

The menus make no sense. Every time I want to do something to the phone, I have to look through at least three different places in the menus to find it. For example, I have no idea how to adjust the ringer volume. I know it can be done, because I turned it all the way down one time, and thought the phone was broken, because it wouldn't ring. Two weeks later, I accidentally turned it all the way back up. I hope that doesn't happen again. I expect the manual has information about this, but reading that would be cheating.

Also, all phones have some bizarre method to type in alpha. This one took me three tries to figure out at first. It still takes me too long to enter anything; the only thing I remember is that the side arrow buttons change case.The antenna is a joke, played on anyone who doesn't like wearing the holster. It will break if you put it in your pocket commonly. I've replaced it once in three months of using the phone. If you have Verizon, though, they'll replace it for free. And there are aftermarket antennas that seem more sturdy.

Every once in a while, it'll start beeping during a call. I don't know what this is, but messing with the joint usually fixes it. The other person can hear it to. It doesn't drown the conversation, but it is annoying.

After going through three chargers, I'm finally getting rid of this expensive phone. The end connections on desktop and auto chargers are very weak and after a short while, quit connecting correctly to the phone. The only way to get a proper charge is to take battery off of phone and lay it in desktop charger. Doesn't help when on the road. Qwest/Motorola still having a problem with Startac connecting to the Internet in my area. Have had the phone eight months with no solution available from either company. That was one of the main reasons I bought it. But, if you don't need to go online and can do without your phone being operational while charging, it's perfect.

I have recently switched cellular service six times in the last five years due to "better deals" and promises of superior service. I have concluded that for the next five years at least you must have analog and ditigal capability to even have a chance at a usable signal. This phone has 800 and 1600 MHz CDMA digital capability as well as 800 MHz analog capability. This takes the price well above others but what good is the phone without a signal?

I appreciate the small size of the phone as well as the batteries. Analog cut battery standby life to 12 hours and analog talk time to one hour, but having a spare so small is convenient.

I bought this phone for a recent trip. It proved to be a good buy. I'm dissppointed that Motorola insists on a complicated and expensive external antenna scheme. I don't use through-the-glass or magnet-mount antennas. There appears to be no simple cable option to connect to a real antenna already installed on a vehicle.

I love this phone! I have had it for a week and have used it quite alot, the phone molds itself around your heard very comfortably during use, and the sound quality is first rate. It is a dual band phone that is also internet capable. For simple searches it is adequate for your mobile needs. If I had to find anything wrong with the phone the size of the Lcd screan is small enough to make web pages hard to read. but I knew I was buying a small Phone to begin with.....