my name is mwd

So, having had a V3 for a week now, I thought I’d write up a few comments on it. Overall I’m happy with the phone. Hardware good, software mediocre (see my previous rant about installing the WinXP software for an idea of how well Motorola seem to handle software).

So, first the plus points. It’s physically a nice phone to use. I got it because I like flip phones - the UI of opening to receive a call and shutting to terminate a call just seems the right thing. And of course it stops you dialling people when you don’t mean to. The build quality seems fine, and it’s a nice size. It’s not actually much smaller than any other phone, but it’s nice and flat so it fits nicely in your pocket. You’d not want to put anything else in that pocket for fear of scratching the case, but then I had that with the T610. The sound quality is good, better than the T610 (which wasn’t bad - this is just better). And the camera is quite amazing quality for a phone, as you can see from this picture. The keypad is also good to use, with nice motion, something I’d been worried about as it looked like it wasn’t flexible.

The bad. Well, the software on it is quite pants. Not bad, just not good. The menus have to navigated by the arrow keys, whereas on the T610 you could just jump to an item by pressing the matching number if you were familiar with it, which was a real nice feature. Phone book entries are (at least by default) one per number, not one per person. Basically it’s just cumbersome. It has all the features, just they’re not really in any way that seems like they took into account day to day usage.

Overall though I’m happy with my phone, especially once I got the old phone style ring tone I had on my T610 back (many thanks to Jonathan for helping me out there). Once you get used to having to various GUI quirks, it’s a fine phone, and does well at the main things like making phone calls and sending messages. If only we could get a V3 with Sony Ericsson software, that would majorly rock :)