Motorola W220

By Damian Koh, CNET Asia
Dec 19, 2006

Mobile phones that profess to be capable of a thousand-and-one things are not many. So when the Motorola W220 was delivered to our Labs, its basic feature set sent us on a journey back to the days when cellular phones were used only for making calls and SMS texting. The only difference was this clamshell arrived in a sleek package and is nothing like the water bottle-shaped mobile phones (or bricks, as some would call them) of yesteryear.

Design
Motorola's Razr series was a hit with the fashion-conscious and the W220 carries on the same tradition, but at a more affordable price. You can use the glossy black lid as a mirror for the narcissist in you. The front display also doubles as a notification screen. Using three LED icons, the phone tells you when there's an incoming call, text message or when the battery is charging. Glossy surfaces have one nemesis, though: Fingerprint stains. Unfortunately, there's no way around it, so always keep a piece of cleaning cloth handy if you are particular about smudgy surfaces.

Flip open the clamshell and you'll be greeted with a 1.5-inch color screen. Compared with most phones today, the display leans on the smaller side but should suffice for the basic applications you'd expect to run on this handset. We like the large fonts used when dialing numbers and, although the text messaging fonts are small, they are still clearly readable an arm's length away.

The W220's keypad lights up in a cool blue shade when activated and is responsive to key presses. The directional control lets you access four customizable shortcuts, while the central button brings up the phone's main menu.

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