Motorola C650

Discontinued
9th March 2004

After Motorola's disappointing attempt at a budget candy-bar camera phone with the C550, it seemed that Motorola were in the doldrums when it came to competing head-on with Nokia for this particular mass-market sector.

However, Motorola have been aggressively introducing new models as of late and the C650 represents a significant improvement over the poorly received C550, although the C650 is not really an innovative phone in any way.

The improvements are immediately obvious. The C650 has a much larger display than the C550, coming in at a standard 128x128 pixels in 65,000 colours. The design of the phone is much more appealing than the old one, plus the built-in camera has been upgraded with a 4x digital zoom.

There's some other fun stuff too, like the MotoMixer application for creating your own ringtones, MP3 ringtone support, Java for games, GPRS for web browsing, MPEG-4 video playback and instant messaging support. Very sensibly it's a tri-band phone too.

The C650 is a much better effort by Motorola, offering budget features in a fun package. It should be available sometime in the second quarter of 2004.