First off the Good, the Motorola V600 packs an impressive 750mAh battery giving it 240 hours of standby and over 400 minutes of talk time between charges, it has Bluetooth 1.1 as standard enabling it to work with a variety of BT enabled gadgets including hands free kits and headsets. It has full support for both MP3 and polyphonic ring tones, a VGA resolution camera that can be used to create mms messages, built in speakerphone and numerous office applications like a calendar and pop3 email support.

The V600 is a quad band phone providing European and American roaming with support for GPRS data services. it has on board memory of 5mb which provides enough storage for 1000 contacts, these are accessed by the main LCD screen which is bright and displays colour well. There is also a 4 line display which is backlit blue on the outer shell of the V600, this provides basic phone status / time and then switches to show who's calling.

Sounds good? well yes it does and then you get to use a Motorola V600 and I guess this this the bad bit, having lived with a V600 for a week we can report that in essence it is a good phone but the bad bits are very very bad.

Take the phone book...no please take it!  we've had enough of the multiple entries for the same person, an individual contact for your home number, work number, mobile, even your email gets its own entry, why?  Both Nokia and Sony Ericsson have had this resolved for years with a single entity having reams of possible data fields.

But at least you don't have to scroll through all of them......oh well that's not true either you do have to scroll through, of course you can search by first letter but then it's using the 4 way rocker to scroll through 4 entries for Mr Smith, 5 entries for Mr Slinky.

Whoever thought that it was acceptable to provide such a poor user interface to a contact list should be taken out and shot, we found ourselves praying that someone's number was in the recent call list as its easier to redial from there! 

But it doesn't end there the office software is poor our old Psion 5MX had a more comprehensive diary feature and Motorola's software provided on CD is only a 30 day evaluation copy and god forbid you want a cable to link it to your PC so you can use it!  All this comes as standard with both Nokia and SE, no extras just good software with the phone and no hidden costs.

The less said about the inability of the V600 to ring and vibrate at the same time the better, but one would expect a menu option of vibrate + ring to mean both at the same time?  not the V600 instead it vibrates first and after a while rings, so if you leave this setting on you will end up with lots of missed calls.

So having got here why would you possibly buy a V600?

Well here's the twist it's not ugly! in fact far from it, we can't believe that Motorola managed to let someone stuff up the innards so badly with an appalling GUI and yet the outer clamshell design is so well executed.

The V600 feels perfectly balanced in the hand, despite being a flip phone it is very well built and one might almost say crafted, the standard silver express on covers compliment the black central section that houses the blue LCD display and when you get a call the shell lights up with one of many different a meaningful light displays. For example you can have the Motorola set to flash red if its work and even select a specific ring tone and then select a yellow display for friends.

Overall our week with the V600 has proven it to be a curates egg of a phone, fantastic styling and a wonderful tactile experience with some pretty smart extras, let down by penny pinching when it comes to software and a simply abysmal attempt at a navigation system and phone book.

If you are looking for a Smartphone to use with GPRS or office applications then try and Sony Ericsson P910 or Sony Ericsson S700 both are designed for the job and will make you much happier, but if you want a phone for style, feel and sheer exhibitionism then the V600 is probably for you. Us? well LP is lucky enough to have 2 phones one that works (P900) and now the V600 for show.

More Mobile Phones -

[ Up ] [ Classic Mobiles ] [ Motorola V600 ] [ Sony Ericsson Z1010 ] [ Sagem my700x Review ] [ Nokia N91 Preview ] [ Sony Ericsson Z600 Flip ] [ Motorola V500 ] [ Blackberry 7100V Review ]