For its target market -- budget users and those who don't want bells and whistles -- the MOTOFONE is an excellent phone option. Those who require more pizzazz will quickly grow irked at its shortcomings, however.
Design
What does seventy bucks buy you? Well, in mobile terms, any number of
capped plans for a month, or about one-tenth of a decent phone. What you
wouldn't normally expect it to get you is a half-decent phone -- or at
least a phone that looks like it was designed in the last six years.
That's where Motorola's low-cost MOTOFONE is deceptive; it's a thin,
stylish phone with enough features liberally cribbed from Motorola's bag
of design tricks to appeal to most users -- but it's also only one dollar
short of seventy bucks. For some mobile phone users, that's practically
throwaway money.
The other notable thing about the MOTOFONE, from a design perspective, is that it's remarkably thin for a candybar form factor phone. It measures in at 114 by 47 by 9 millimetres with a carrying weight of 70 grams. The keypad is large and easy to use, with simple dial, hang up, contacts and menu buttons surrounding a five-way keypad.
Features
The crux of whether or not the MOTOFONE will appeal to you lies in its
feature set -- or lack thereof. It's a GSM-capable mobile phone, which in
the Australian market is locked to Optus -- and it comes with a
prepaid SIM in the box. It'll do SMS, and you've got a choice of some
very standard monophonic ring tones. That's it, however -- there's no
Bluetooth, GPRS, camera, GPS, 3G, HSDPA or even simple phone games. If
you're incurably addicted to features like this you'll find the MOTOFONE
vexatious in the extreme. Then again, it's a phone, and it works. Why
pay for stuff you don't need or use?
The MOTOFONE features a rather unusual display, for two primary reasons.
It uses a black and white electrophoretic display that Motorola
brands as ClearVision. The intention with ClearVision is that the
display should appear as paper-like as possible, but also with an eye to
being viewable in all sorts of lighting conditions, including direct
sunlight. The other display oddity is in the font used, which is
massive. That's undoubtedly a plus for those with visual difficulties,
but the horizontal orientation of the text, which only ever scrolls like a ticker
along one line, means that most SMS messages -- and even missed calls and
contact details -- scroll along multiple screens, which can make
comprehension difficult. If anything, it's a strong incentive to use
SMS-speak, if only to enable easily scanned messages.
Performance
In case it hasn't sunk in yet, the MOTOFONE is just a basic phone, and
as a basic phone it works quite well. Call clarity was good in our tests
-- those of a paranoid bent might like to note that the default call
volume is quite loud -- and battery life was fairly solid. Motorola rates
it for up to 450 minutes talk time and up to 270 hours standby time --
largely because when not in use the screen powers down to a simple
digital clock display. In our testing, it lasted around three days heavy
usage before needing recharging. This brought up one of our lesser
concerns about the MOTOFONE, and that's in the fact that it takes quite
a while to recharge. This isn't a concern if you're an overnight
recharger, but it's not possible to do a quick recharge and get anything
but a perfunctory charge into the MOTOFONE.
In order to make sense of the MOTOFONE's icon-based and rather simple menu system, the phone comes with voice prompting for each and every feature in a variety of languages. It's a good way to get to grips with how the phone works -- and how its menu designers think -- but can be quite embarrassing in public situations to have your phone patiently explaining how to send an SMS. It's basically a training tool; once you've worked out the menu structures you'll undoubtedly want to switch the voice prompting off as soon as possible.
SMS was acceptable, but the phone is lacking in one feature we'd say was essential for SMS devotees -- there's no predictive text facility. Admittedly, the huge size of the screen font could make some automatically completed words indiscernible, but it's still something we missed having.
There's no doubting that there's a whole market out there that would hate the MOTOFONE for its lack of high-end features, but that's not the market that Motorola's after with the impressively simple MOTOFONE. For what it is, and what it sets out to be, it succeeds admirably, and comes highly recommended.
Motorola MOTOFONE F3 Editors' choice
Company: Motorola
RRP: AU$69
1%
1%
I was having to charge my Sony Ericcson k800i phone every day because of heavy use, and the phone was mostly used for voice calls only for business.
Before having the k800i i had a HP IPAQ and before that an 02 XDA11. I have finally settled on the humble f3.
1: The F3 doesnt need charging all the time
2: The f3 does exactly what its meant to do
3: The F3 is small and light, and most importantly for me thin, this means that i can put the phone in my pocket and not worry about it looking like a lump on my leg.
Every single phone i have ever had looked like a lump on my leg, i ended up carrying it, which looks stupid, its a bit outdated walkking about with a mobile phone, and looks stupid.
With the F3 i can issue everyone in our group with one, knowing they wont be wasting time with productivity because all they can do is text and type, and know they will most likely be in touch and their phone wont run out because of the battery life.
In all, the best things in life are the small ones, by taking away all the bells and whistles, you have a perfectly functional, ergonomic (Nobody will know you have a phone on you, no more bulges) and overall smart looking phone.
The phone looks really great, its more like a toy, very retro.
Go on, downgrade, save energy, save the earth, save the bulge!