Ring ring:10 mobile phones tested

Motorola's super-classy James Bond model might look the business, but what´s under the hood?

The first thing that strikes you about the Motorola V70 is the elegant form factor. It is shaded in matte silver with black and grey highlights, while a fetching reflective metal ring clings to the perimeter of the display portal. This circular aspect is also functional – a flat panel that protects the keypad rotates smoothly around this ring, clicking into place at the 12 o´clock mark to serve as the speaker. In this configuration the phone is twice as long, the controls are exposed and you are ready to make a call. The slide orbits around smoothly and clicks into place with a pleasing magnetic snap. We like this feature – however we were hoping that it would spring out into place, like a switchblade.

That said, you can train yourself to suavely open and close it with one hand, which is a classy way to end a call. The phone seems to visually compact upon itself, becoming something the size of a fob watch. Unfortunately, the phone doesn´t have much oomph in terms of earpiece volume and where you might have pressed the phone against your ear to hear better, the “blade” of the earpiece section prevents you from doing this with confidence.

The phone is small when closed, although its protruding aerial adds quite a lot to its length. The metal orbit surrounding the display is a sexy idea, but tends to attracts fingerprints and grimy-looking marks. There are a few replaceable orbit designs though, such as translucent yellow “Honey Dew” and “Sable” which is unsurprisingly black.

The keypad is set into a block of translucent plastic, which glows an ominous blue in low light conditions. The V70 has tiny little shiny keys that are hard, with a short travel that we found slightly tricky to get used to.

The v70´s display is a really trendy white-on-black contrast but there are several layers of reflective material between the exterior and the actual display, which is deeply recessed into the casing. As a result, in bright light conditions it is often difficult to read the display. It's especially poor when lying on a desk, as you can´t read the display without picking it up.

It features a two-line and thank goodness also three-line display settings, which reduce the text size. Why anyone would voluntarily choose to display less than three lines of information on the screen (eyesight issues not withstanding) is beyond us.

The menu system is a touch linear, but mpressively, you can re-order the items as they appear on the menu. This is a highly progressive feature that really lets you minimise the time spent surfing through options that you don't often use.

The V70 has a serviceable voice-dialling function, based on pre-recorded samples for each number. The storage space is ample and you can choose to store each number either on the SIM card or the actual phone. Although, this can have unexpected repercussions. The review hardware we received was packed with personal phone numbers from a previous user – and removing them was quite time consuming. We wonder whether that user has their own copy of these numbers on their SIM card? Considering the exclusive SIM or phone storage option, we doubt it.

When the phone is closed, and idle for a while, an analogue clock displayed on the screen. There are various “cool” forms of this clock, which acts like a screensaver. One mode called “Orbital” displays the hands of the clock as rotating orbs within a white circle. Another clock layout called “Broadcast” is a neo-artistic form with simple lines denoting the hands of the clock only, on a black background. Unfortunately there isn´t a digital form of these stylish analogue clock screensavers. When you turn off the clock screensaver, the default display can include a standard (non-arty) digital clock.

In our informal testing, we found the Motorola V70 gave us 60.5 hours of battery life with average use.

The V70 sports decent SMS functions, including the ITAP text entry technology, which is touted to increase your speed. One thing that we didn´t like is the way incoming SMS messages and phone calls don´t display the “name” of correspondents, referenced from your phone book. Instead, only the number is shown. This sucks when you have many contacts and can´t possibly remember all of their numbers. It forces you to use guesswork to figure out who the correspondent is, or a time-consuming hunt through the address book to find out for sure.

The V70 features advanced games with good graphics – they are smooth but the action games are somewhat sluggish as the screen updates rather slowly. These range from a cool version of Blackjack, an all too easy solo version of Pong called "Paddleball" and a Mastermind clone named "MindBlaster".

The V70 supports GPRS services and a WAP 1.1 compliant ‘microbrowser´, but we were unable to comprehensively test these features. We were not provided with a GPRS compatible account for the review. However the screen´s average resolution and poor contrast don´t make it an ideal candidate for information-viewing.

Overall, the Motorola V70 is a classy looking phone with middle-of-the-road functionality. It performs adequately as a phone, however the functions won´t knock your socks off. Ideal for those who seek to impress.

Motorola V70 mobile phone
Company: Motorola Australia
Price: AU$819
Distributor: Selected resellers