It was that time of the year again - time to upgrade my cell phone. Of course, this was in October .... and I finally got my new phone this December after much heart ache.
Firstly, my heart was set on the Nokia 6101 (with FM radio), but hopes of getting my hands on this phone were dashed by Nokia's hair-brained scheme of releasing only a few models of the phone into the market. After waiting desperately over 2 months for the phone to become available, the situation with my old Nokia started to get really bad (15 mins on time, 45 mins off time) and I started looking around for another option. The next phone to catch my eye was the black Moto RAZR, but the terrible thing was too expensive. I've never paid full price for a cell in my life and I wasnt about to start now (yes, yes, I'm cheap), so after waiting around for some more time, when my cell phone provider suddenly reduced the price on the Motorola V330, I jumped at the offer.
Motorola V330 - Features and fun stuff
First of all, I'm a die-hard Nokia fan. The last 4 phones I've owned have been Nokia's and I never had any problems with any of them. The previous model I had, the Nokia 3650, was built like a tank. It withstood every kind of abuse I subjected it to for 2 whole years and never once gave up the ghost. The only thing was that the battery started failing the past couple of months, and after 2 years heavy-duty use I wasnt complaining. But, at the time of my upgrade, I was really sick of the candy bar phones and had decided that the new phone I wanted, would be a flip. Nokia's latest flip seemed to be the answer to all my problems, but it wasnt to be ....
I have to admit being pleasantly surprised by the quad-band Motorola V330. Released sometime in May 2005, it's small (3.5 x 1.9 x 0.98), cute & lightweight (4.3 oz) and it comes in a blue rubberised shell (scratch-proof, but not smudge-proof) unlike all the generic silver and black phones out there. It has a small stub antenna, a 2 line monochrome external display with a blue backlight and a camera lens with self-portrait mirror and a couple of external keys (for changing volume, ring tone and voice recorder) on the outside. The inside has a large, bright screen with 65,500 colours and a very nice, intuitive keypad. The screen is very bright and clear indoors but when I took it outdoors, had to strain to see anything on it :( The keypad is certainly a relief, after the rotary 3650 one, which I still hadnt got used to after 2 years. The thing that I like most about this phone is it also has Bluetooth. This was one of the major influencing factors (after the flip thing) that made me buy this. It does have support for a USB data cable, but the Bluetooth is awesome. Transferring contacts from my Nokia to my Mac and then to this phone was eeeeasy!
The phone has built-in support for polyphonic and MP3 ring tones. Of course, the ones loaded are rubbish, but you can download any number - there's about 5 MB of unextendable memory. The VGA camera can laugh like a chimp after u take a pic .... now if only I could make the chimp sound before I clicked it would have been awesome!! No more ...say cheese!! The camera has 4x zoom and a auto-timer, which I found impressive. The pics taken by the camera seem quite good when viewing on the phone screen, lack in resolution on my computer and look worse than the pics taken by my 2 year old Nokia. But the camera isnt really a huge priority for me, so I dont care too much. You can take videos too for a couple of seconds, the sound plays back loud and clear. There's even a voice recorder on here, I just havnt used it enough.
Applications are, I think the normal ones on most Moto phones alongwith a 1000 contact phone book with voice dialling option. The one thing that really irritated me is that there is no Notepad like application for little notes, to-do lists or memos. I really used this feature a lot so not having it here is a major inconvenience. Oh, as for games, there's a Bejewelled demo and one game loaded in - Pinball, but what can I say, I love this game. I could play it for hours so I dont miss not having anything else there. As you can see I'm not an avid gamer :) and my needs are few.
Call quality and sound are pretty good. I havnt had any dropped calls so far and really have nothing to complain about. I like the customisation options, with wallpaper, skins and themes. There's only the 'Hello Moto' theme loaded though, so you have to buy or download more themes if you want more. I have not enabled the Internet and data features on my calling plan, so dont have much to say about them ....
The good and the bad - when compared to the Nokia 3650
In the size, weight, looks and customization areas the Motorola V330 wins hands down. But, I find the Nokia's menus to be more intuitive than the Motorola ones. The features are not grouped very well and it takes a long time to navigate to any particular setting - even with the smart key, shortcut keys and other options that are available. What I like about the navigation options is that other than the left and right shortcuts that I can assign to my keypad, I can even assign shortcuts to the L,R, T and B keys for quick access.
The battery on my Nokia didnt require as frequent charging as this one does. Seems to me that even if I change my wallpaper, it drains the battery :( And I really wish that I could lock the phone, since the external keys are always getting pressed in my purse or pocket.
One last thing I'm going to crib about is the lack of a proper OS. As I mentioned earlier, I was irritated since it didnt have a To-Do List, but I thought - no biggie, I can just download a Java application. So, I found a decent Notepad app, also downloaded a couple of games and other utilities (all as .jar files) and tried to use Bluetooth to upload them. Unfortunately, I couldnt upload anything other than .jpg or .mp3. With the Nokia all I have to do is drag and drop and it even unpacks the jars and installs the applications for me. So easy!! I think it's because the 3650 has the Symbian OS. Hunting around on the Moto forums, I find that I just might be able to install things using the USB cable, but which means I have to buy the cable first and then spend time on figuring how to do the rest :( Bah! Bad phone!!
Blue, is the love you discover
However, all said and done, I have to say that I'm quite impressed with this little, blue, full-featured phone. It's finally made me come out of the Nokia is best mould ... but there are some good features and some learn-to-live-with features. If you can buy it at a cheap price (or are able to get it free, like I did :), dont hesitate in getting it. If price isnt an issue, go for the newer version, the Motorola V360, which adds an MP3 player and memory card slot. And yes, the V330 doesnt have FM radio, but so what ? It's been 15 days and I find I can live without it ....
3.5 / 5
UPDATED - Feb 04, 2007
I had this phone until Dec last year, a full one year, and ultimately we didnt have any problems even after dunking the poor thing into a lake and other things like this. The only major problem as I saw it with this was with the battery life.
