| Review of the Motorola v300 |
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The V300 is a compact GSM clamshell phone that supports 850 MHz and 1900 MHz for use in North America, and 900 MHz for use in most other parts of the world. It’s missing only support for 1800 MHz, which isn’t as big a hindrance as you might think. Just about any country that has GSM1800 has GSM900, and many of the older and better-established networks are on 900 MHz anyway. Just the same, if you really must have a quad-band phone, you can wait for the release of the V600. Last Updated: 28-Mar-2004 |
Before reading this review, please read Some Thoughts on Phone Reviewing.
General
The first thing that really struck me about the V300 was
its overall shape, size, and feel. Unlike any of the other V-series phones, the
V300 comes with a soft rubber-like coating that makes it feel silky in your
hand, and helps it to grip surfaces and avoid sliding around. When opened the
phone has what feels like the perfect weight and proportions (for my hands at
any rate), and it has excellent balance (which important in a clamshell design).
The hinge is rock-solid, and it seemed more like the sturdy design of a Samsung
than of a Motorola. If you aren’t a big fan of clamshell designs (which I’m not)
the V300 could change your mind.
Like virtually all clamshell designs these days it has an external display that
shows you the time, battery condition, and signal level during idle, and the
name or number of an incoming call. Motorola also uses a reverse LCD layout, not
unlike many car radio designs. This means white-on-black instead of the
traditional black-on-white lettering. Backlight is provided by deep blue LEDs.
My only gripe with the display was its abbreviated width. When displaying just a
phone number it has to squish all of the digits into the available space using a
very small font and no spaces to differentiate the area code and exchange. For
example, if you received a call from 905-555-5123 the display would show
+19055555123, which isn’t easy to read.
When displaying a name form the phone book it can display only the first 5 or 6
characters of the name, mainly because quite a bit of space is used up by the
icon represent the category of the number (home, work, fax, etc), and another
icon to indicate an incoming call (like you really need that for reinforcement).
For example, when I called the phone I’d see a little bouncing phone logo, a
second logo telling which type of phone number it was, followed by an
inordinately large amount blank space, followed finally by “Steve…”. Umm, Steve
who? There are too many pointless logos and not enough real information for my
liking.
The internal screen is a completely different matter. It’s easily the best color
screen I’ve seen since the Sharp GX22. It doesn’t quite have the resolution of
the Sharp (220x176 pixels on the V300 vs 320x240 pixels on the GX22), but the
overall crispness and color clarity were at least on par. It would have been
great to have a GX22 to compare directly, but as I didn’t, I had to go with what
I could remember. The main display is perhaps one of the phone’s best features.
While the screen is quite large, Motorola wastes a lot of screen real estate in
many of the menus and input screens by trying to be cute and Windows-like. In
many instances for example you get only 7 lines of useable text while the rest
of the screen is taken up with status bars and faded versions of the background
image to give you the feel of a window-on-a-desktop (just like your home
computer). Thankfully they do provide full-screen input for SMS and email
messages. Generally however, I believe that Motorola has under-utilized the
gorgeous screen on this phone in the name of looks.
The font is handsome and extremely readable. Sadly Motorola forgot about their
multiple-font-size feature that has appeared (for better or for worse) on most
of their phones since the new menu scheme first appeared. Without a font size
option the standard font is just too small for some applications. It’s great if
you have the luxury of time to look closely at the screen, but if you’re in a
situation where you must glance quickly (such as when you are driving) a larger
font would have been a welcome addition.
The keypad is a bit of a mixed bag. The numeric keys aren’t too bad, as they are
raised enough to be felt easily without looking at them, and they press with a
positive and reassuring click. I virtually never made keying errors with the
numeric keys. I wasn’t awfully thrilled about the some-round-some-rectangular
design, but in reality it never really presented much of a problem.
I can’t say the same for the 4-way cursor. The ring containing the 4 cursor keys
lacked sufficient feel, and I often had trouble getting these keys to response
as expected. I often found myself frustrated with them. The okay button in the
middle of the ring wasn’t too bad, and the collection of 5 larger buttons
surround the 4-way ring seemed to work well enough. I adjusted to the feel of
the keypad, but I never felt at home with it.
The volume buttons on the side of the phone fell readily to hand, and were easy
to discern. However, the voice-dial/recorder button on the right hand side of
the phone seemed difficult to press, and even harder to keep pressed while
recording something the caller was saying. I would have preferred a
press-to-start and press-to-end system for the voice recorder.
The operating system is pure Motorola, and it differs little from the menu
system originally seen on such phones as the P280
and the V66. However, there have been some useful
improvements, especially in the phonebook. The GSM guys at Motorola picked up a
few ideas from their colleagues in the iDEN department and have created a more
cohesive multi-number system. It’s still light years behind other manufacturers,
but it is at least a vast improvement over the poor phonebook of the P280 days.
The phone supports Picture ID, which displays a photograph on the internal
display to match the caller. However, in order to use this feature you must turn
off the open-to-answer mode, and you must press a key to accept or reject the
call. It also takes quite a few seconds from the time you open the phone to the
time that the picture is displayed (which gets worse as you put more pictures
into the phone’s memory). This means you have to stand there looking like an
idiot while you stare at a ringing phone. This feature is poorly implemented,
and of limited novelty value.
Text entry is via Motorola’s iTAP technology, but before you get too disgusted
by that news let me tell you that implementation in the V300 is greatly improved
over earlier attempts, though it’s hardly the model of perfection. For starters
they now support a user dictionary, and that dictionary will accept words
containing numbers, so long as one of those numbers isn’t a zero. I could enter
words containing zeros (like V300) into the dictionary, but I couldn’t
figure out how to retrieve them.
The dictionary does not memorize the upper and lowercase status of each letter,
and I was rather frustrated by the fact that a period is not the default
character for the 1 key (an apostrophe is). At least Nokia phones are
smart enough to accept the 1 key as a period if the next character is a space or
an apostrophe otherwise. The V300 always treats it as an apostrophe, thus
forcing you to press the cursor right key to select the period.
Like many phones these days the V300 includes a speakerphone feature. For once
we have a small phone with enough volume to make the speakerphone truly useful
in day-to-day applications. While the speaker volume isn’t nearly as loud as a
typical Motorola iDEN phone (even the i730,
which is among the quietest of the line) it still blasts past the silly excuse
for speakerphones on most other phones. You can have comfortable two-way
conversations using the speakerphone, even in mildly noisy environments.
Microphone sensitivity is boosted when the speakerphone feature is activated,
and the feature works just as well with the clamshell closed as it does with it
open.
The V300 comes packed with some very neat musical ringtones that sound so good
on the built-in speaker that you might actually play them just for
entertainment. They could do with being a bit louder, but overall they seem to
function well, and will likely be a big hit with the target audience.
The phone supports Profiles, but they haven’t improved in any way over those
originally offered in the P280. Compared to many other phones on the market, and
especially compared to Motorola’s own i730, the Profiles are fairly pitiful.
They set the ring tone styles and ring tone volumes, but that’s about it.
Also like many phones these days the V300 includes a camera, but the quality of
the 640 x 480 images is very disappointing. The following two images demonstrate
the vast difference between the quality of the V300’s camera and a Nikon Coolpix
990 set to take 640 x 480 images. Please note that before I took these pictures
I thoroughly cleaned the lens using a proper lens cleaning cloth. The photograph
was not taken through glass, and there was nothing between the lens and image to
distort results. No post-processing was done to these pictures, they appear
exactly as they were rendered by the cameras.
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| The above photograph was taken with the
V300. Note the Fisheye effect. |
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| The above photograph was taken with the
Nikon Coolpix 990 in 640 x 480 mode |
The quality was so poor in fact that even when I used the
snaps I’d taken as wallpaper I could still see how poor they were. I wanted to
upload a picture I’d taken with the Coolpix camera, but I ran into size
restrictions in the email client, which I will discuss later.
The V300 sports Motorola’s slightly-improved Datebook functionality. It includes
a terrific month-view, but aside from that it doesn’t really offer very much
added functionality over earlier efforts. There is only one type of Datebook
entry, and while you can set alarms for them, the selection of times at which
the alarm can be set for is rather limited by the way Motorola approaches the
concept. Rather than letting you select an actual date and time for the alarm,
you must tell the phone how many minutes, or hours, or days, or weeks in
advance of the event that you wish to be reminded. Oddly you cannot ask to have
the reminder fired at the same time as the event. The closest you can get is 1
minutes in advance.
The V300 has a built-in voice recorder, which can be used to record your own
voice, or both sides of a telephone conversation. Sound quality of the
recordings is not bad, but it’s hardly stellar. It should suit your needs.
Maximum combined recording time is rather short at approximately 2 minutes. This
is strangely undersized for a phone with megabytes of memory in it.
I didn’t much like the fact that to record a conversation you had to press and
hold the button on the right side of the phone. If that button had better feel I
might have liked it a bit more (the one on the P280 wasn’t bad). Another
annoying feature is a beep that is recorded every 10 seconds. During playback
the beep is so loud that it makes you pull the phone away from your ear. There
is no apparent way to play your recordings through the speaker.
The microbrowser makes excellent use of the screen real estate, and it would be
a terrific browser if it wasn’t so damned slow. Scrolling through even simple
screens containing text links is an exercise in frustration. Sluggish browsers
seem to be the norm for all Motorola phones (which I had tested).
The V300 includes a POP3 email client that allows you to use your GPRS
connection to send and receive email. It worked great for sending email, or for
receiving mail without attachments. However, there seems to be an upper limit of
60,000 bytes per message, else the client refuses to download it (even the
header, arghhh). I tried to set the limit to 0 in hopes that I could get around
the download limitation, but nothing seemed to work. If anyone knows how to get
around this, I’d appreciate hearing form you.
When it came to battery life, I was actually rather impressed. The phone uses a
slim (low-capacity) battery, yet even after a full day of playing with the phone
and making one to two hours of on-air tests I had only managed to drop the
battery meter by 1 bar. I never actually ran the battery all the way down to
find out how much longer it would have lasted, but the important point was I
couldn’t run the battery down in a single day. Unless you don’t have access
to a means of charging the phone on a nightly basis, the battery life the V300
should be fine.
RF Performance and Audio Quality
But what about RF and
audio performance? In that regard the V300 is a
reasonably good phone, though not as stellar as I’d expected. My ability to
compare RF performance at 850 MHz however was sorely limited, and for the time
being the only phone I had to make the comparison with was a
Motorola C333. I was able to test the phone
against many others at 1900 MHz, fortunately.
Testing the phone at 1900 MHz was just a matter of finding an area where 850 MHz
signals were not present. Fortunately the cell site inside of Square One has
only 1900 MHz channels on it, and so I was able to use the usual Hall of
Shame to run my tests. I was rather surprised to find that the V300 had
mediocre performance at 1900, and was beaten handily by the
Nokia 6310i, Nokia 6190,
and by the C333!!! This isn’t to say that the 1900 MHz performance of the V300
is poor, only that it could be better.
Testing 850 MHz was also easy, and I was able to do that inside Square One as
well. Over in the far corner of the lower level of Sears the in-mall cell
site had no reach. All signals there came from sites outside of the store, and
so 850 MHz was preferred by both the V300 and the C333. I had Field Test Mode
operating on both of these phones to ensure that I was indeed on an 850 MHz
channel during the test. On this band the V300 performed just as well as the
C333, at least in terms of pulling in a signal. It did a better of job of making
weak signals sound clearer (a definite weakness of the C333).
Over-the-road performance was one of the phone’s really strong points. Like many
good-quality Motorola phones the V300 handles network problems and handoffs
quite well. This is one place where the V300 has it all over C333, as the
over-the-road performance of the C333 is horrendously bad.
Incoming audio quality is exceptional, with excellent tonal balance and sound
reproduction. Sadly the earpiece volume is too low (especially on Rogers, which
has lower audio volume than Fido). The phone apparently has an audio boost
feature, like that found in many Nokia and Kyocera phones. When the background
noise gets over a certain level the phone automatically increases the earpiece
volume (though not by a whole lot).
Fortunately the V300 is a lot like the i730, in that it provides excellent
volume to the headset jack. If you use a good-quality headset or earbud (like
the Samsung earbud I use) then you’ll find the audio quality is just as nice as
on the native earpiece, but a whole lot louder. The V300 does not support
Bluetooth, and so you’ll have to settle for a tethered headset of some sort.
Outgoing sound quality is good, but not nearly as good as the incoming audio.
The phone can cope well with loud background noises like the deafening roar in
my Wife’s 1977 pickup truck on the highway. Oddly the outgoing audio actually
sounds better in the presence of background noise than it does in a quiet
environment.
So despite some glaring weaknesses and omissions, the V300 is a very competent
phone. If I were personally in the market for a GSM phone on Rogers I would give
serious consideration to getting a V300. I’d consider it because of its strong
points, rather than reject it for what it doesn’t do so well.
