Motorola V500 - Orange - Pay As You Go  Mobile Phone

Firstly this phone looks good, not perhaps the best looking but its certainly stylish. The 'blue' external screen provides enough information that you'd want outside the main high quality screen inside. The screen is the best i have seen apart from that of the Sharp GX20, it is both bright and clear. The buttons are a good size and the build quality feels very sturdy both on the keys and in flipping it open/closed.

This phone is rich in features too, with bluetooth, quad band, voice dialling, photo's and speaker phone to name a few. It has a high quality sound with a large range of polyphonics coming as standard.

The camera is good quality too, it has a 4x digital zoom and brightness control which enables you to take pictures in lower light but unfortunately not in the dark. The menu systems are easy to navigate and don't really take long to get used to.

On the downside you'd have to be really picky to be critical of this phone. Compared to some other models on the market this obviously hasn't got the benefit of video recording and flash lighting. The design is rather chunky too, but personally i think this is a sign of better build quality and toughness. Some suggest a problem is beeping for low battery in silent/vibrate mode - this is NOT the case, at least for later firmware models as sold here.

Overall, I would thoroughly recommend this phone to anyone and if you do buy it, you won't be disappointed. Coupled with the text saver, its an awesome package! The only better all-round phone (and my friends agree with this), is the Sharp GX20 but then that is a larger-sized phone! For a good looking phone which is easy to use and has most of the top features available, the Motorola V500 fits the bill perfectly.

Also it is surprisingly cheaper than many equivalent or lesser quality rivals.

Another annoying niggle is that I can't find any way to enable delivery reports for text messages, which is something that even my mom's beat up old skool nokia allows her to do easily. Again this is elementary, so why is this missing in a EMS/MMS quad band phone?

The phone book system seems a little weird for me, having migrated from using the sony-ericsson T68i, instead of having one contact with several numbers under one contact name, the V500 displays the same name multiple times, but displays a different icon to represent home, office, mobile, etc. I find this annoying, but I guess it's just a different way of doing things.

Back to text messages: seems if you want to compose a text message and then decide not to send it yet, you'll have to copy and past the text info from the 'new message' folder (to be fair, copy and past is useful in a phone, I think!) into a new message in the 'drafts' folder. Is this really a big deal? Not really, but again, it's just annoying in such a high tech phone.

If I'm going to be pedantic, I might as well say that I could do without having two menu systems to deal with in a phone (there's a first menu of shortcuts: messages, internet and games, then a second menu of all the phones features grouped by category.), but this might be just me being to used to the sony-ericsson model.

Don't get me wrong, this is an amazing phone: The camera and screen quality are truely impressive, and browsing the net through GPRS is a real pleasure on a high res large colour screen. The Polyphonic ring tones are great, but it's the ability to have an MP3 or wav file as ring tone that really brings some fun possibilities when you think of all the things you can use to identify your friends and contacts. I just wish they'd gotten the little basics down flat, or made them easier to figure out before moving on to the bells and whistles.