Motorola's T720 phone is an affordable mobile phone with a large number of features. As long as you can spare the time to get used to its quirks, it's a good option for anyone wanting a little bit more from their phone.
The Motorola T720 is a clamshell phone of the style becoming popular in the high-end mobile market. Surprisingly, the T720 is priced in the mid-range, at AU$626.
Folded up, it is 9.1 x 4.8 x 2.5cm, and a fairly light 100g. Unfolded a 4096 colour screen comes into view, and concerns of size fly out of the mind.
The layout of the T720 is good, with the answer/reject keys on either side of a four-way navigation button. Above this are two soft keys, a third key that takes you straight to the main menu, and a normal 12-key number pad. On the left side are two volume buttons, and on the right side is a voice dial button. It sports an external LCD display that easily provides Date, time, signal strength, and battery life readings.
The phone functions well enough, with good call quality and all the mod cons such as GPRS and EMS (enhanced messaging service). However, there aren't any instructions for creating enhanced messages, and while we could insert animations and sound, we were told there were no pictures available to insert. We couldn't figure out how to change that, so we were left with no pictures to insert.
It took us a while to become proficient at writing SMSes on this phone, and if you're not familiar with Motorola's iTap predictive text entry, it's likely to be quite difficult for you too. As you type in the words, the different possible combinations appear at the bottom of the screen, and you use the direction key to choose which word you want. You then have to "select" the word using a soft key, which automatically adds a space after the word, and a fair bit of confusion to the process.
However, once you realise everything is selectable, the process becomes a lot easier and streamlined. When you type a space/punctuation after a word, for example, it is included as one block, and you have to select which one you want. One thing that Motorola doesn't mention is that you can just keep on typing before you select the combination you desire. We got into the habit of typing our entire message into the phone, and only then selecting which of the versions we wanted.
One aspect we liked was the use of the four-way arrow key to change the case of the text. When a letter is highlighted, pressing the arrow up will capitalise it, and pressing it down will send it lower case. Of course, the drawback is that if you attempt to capitalise something in the middle of a sentence the entire highlighted sentence is capitalised.
The T720 allows you to set pictures as background, and animated pictures as a screensaver, although we couldn't find a way to load our own pictures onto the phone. Assumedly if someone sends you a picture you can use that. The phone also sports polyphonic ringtones, and comes with 42 preset ringtones with another 32 slots available for downloaded tones. To change the ringtone, you have to alter one of the "styles" to include the one you want.
The phone has Java capabilities, and comes with three Java games, including the Russian classic Tetris. The phone also has 700Kb of available memory for Java applications, presuming you can afford the generally exorbitant mobile data rates involved with such activity. The phone also offers voice dialling and one-touch dialling, and of course mobile Web browsing and e-mail via GPRS.
The alarm can be entertaining, considering the number of polyphonic tones you can set it to. Just be careful that what you choose is something that will actually wake you-we've trained ourselves to wake to insistent beeping, and anything else will be blithely slept through.
We found the battery life of the T720 to be below par, lasting a total of 84 hours of normal usage in our testing. However, this is about average for colour-screen phones. Motorola advertise it as having up to four hours of talk time and 170 hours of standby.
All in all, the real kicker for the T720 is the price. Although we can't say that any specific feature of the phone is the best in its class, AU$626 is very cheap for the feature set provided by Motorola. If you're prepared to put in a little effort to get used to the foibles of the T720, we'd recommend it.
Motorola T720
Company: Motorola Australia
Price: AU$626
Distributor: Selected Resellers
Phone: 1900 914 914
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