Motorola V600G Phone (Cingular)

Rating:
Summary: Great Phone!
Review: I have been waiting for a phone with Bluetooth technology, as well as a phone that will not become obsolete in a few months. My wait is over! I walked into the Cingular store near me and they had just gotten in the V600. With a 2 year service contract, I got the phone for $200. Expensive these days for a phone, but worth it! This phone feels solid, unlike some other phones that feel like they could break if you look at them the wrong way. The phone has everything I needed and wanted. Some complain about the camera, but, hey! Did you buy the phone to talk of take pictures with? There isn't any phone I have seen that will take a picture better than my digital camera. So, when I hear or read people complaining about the camera, it makes no sense. The sould on this phone is clear. It is a Quad band, so I am not worried about not being able to use this phone anywhere. I wish the phonebook would list numbers by catagories (family, friends, etc) but it is easy to get to a name by just hitting the number that corresponds to the first letter of the name. I am enjoying this phone, which is something I have never been able to say about a cell phone before.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty damn good, if you can live with the address book
Review: I moved from Sony Ericsson T68, so my comparisons will be based on that as a benchmark. First of all, let me say that on paper this new fashion-conscious flip-phone is about the most impressive you can get: Quad-band, Bluetooth, VGA camera, speakerphone, 65k color LCD, dual internal and external displays, 1000 name address book, office tools (calendar, notes, alarm clock, etc.), polyphoinic *and* MP3 ringtones... you name it, it has it. It's small, sleek and relatively light. It even has pulsating color-coded ring-lights on the flip cover! If it's features you want, you can't go wrong with this.

But I don't give it 5 stars, so what's amiss? Well, for a start the packaged battery is abysmal. It barely makes it through one busy day without a recharge, and certainly not if you use Bluetooth heavily. Motorola still uses trickle chargers whereas most of the other manufacturers ship fast chargers as default, so it even takes a long time to recharge. I've heard that the optional extra-strength battery will more than compensate, but that's an extra charge and honestly, poor battery life is simply inexcusable.

Secondly, the phone book and office tools are still as brain-dead as all Motorola phones. The phone book doesn't have a simple "search" function, which means that if you want to call "Sumo" you can jump to the first "s" entry and then you have to scroll through "Salem", "Shahid", "Shujat", "Smock", etc. etc. all the way until you get to Su-. Verrrrrry annoying. Also, what's the point of office tools if you can't integrate them with your desktop? Well, you can but you need to purchase extra software from Motorola, and this software isn't the best. Again, Nokia and Sony supply this software free of charge so what's the deal here?

In the end, I think the pros outweigh the cons, but only by a bit. There are workarounds for each of the issues I've encountered -- I can buy a larger (and more bulky) battery, I can jump to "t" in the address book and then scroll upwards instead of down, and I can use Bluetooth to exchange one business card at a time to sync it with Outlook and the Palm.

On the plus side, hey, it's great to have a decent quality phone camera (it's actually not that bad!), quad-band roaming (with good signal reception!) all over the world, a beautiful bright color screen, and incredibly good looks. Plus, now I can use a Bluetooth (wireless) hands-free kit which doesn't get entangled with the car seatbelts. And that, I think, is the ultimate benefit here.

Rating:
Summary: I loved this phone!
Review: I recently got two of this phone, one for me and one for my boyfriend and both us loved it! Very unique design and impressive function. I love it can actually download the MP3 as ringtone function and 56K pixel camrea. It was awsome overall but I wish it can be a little bit lighter and longer battary life.

Rating:
Summary: Nice phone, but it hates OS X
Review: The phone is sweet, but don't even think about using it with your mac. The bluetooth will allow you to copy pictures and ringtones back and forth from your computer to your phone. But, iSync doesn't work at all. Not with bluetooth. Not even with Motorola's USB data cable. You can use a 3rd party app (onSync) to copy with the data cable, but it won't copy your calendar information at all. And while it will copy your address book, contacts with multiple phone numbers will be listed separately for each number in your phone's address book, making it totally cluttered. The phone itself is nice and all, but what's the point of all this newfangled technology if you can't use it?

Maybe hold out for an iSync update. Maybe hold out for Tiger. But, if I can get out of my Cingular contract, that's exactly what I'll be doing.

My advice? Take a Texas on this one (El Pass-o).

Rating:
Summary: Nice phone
Review: This phone got a lot improved from the previous model of V300. Compare to V300 plastic cover and low resoultion of color, this phone sure gives you more of each things. A unique design with the metal cover, the bluetooth supported, 64k color and you can go with actual MP3 ringtone on it! It sound a lot better than the way V300 sound. The reason I am not giving it five stars - because battary life doesn't last long, the phone is a little bit haveyer than what I have excepted, the phone somehow lagging bad when you call out and receive calls.