Motorola C975 and V975

Discontinued
27th July 2004

Motorola C975

We're scratching our heads here at Mobile Gazette trying to work out Motorola's naming convention, without much insight. Motorola C-series phones are usually budget GSM phones, but the C975 is actually a budget 3G phone, a close rival to the NEC E228 perhaps.

The C975 is a competent 3G phone with all the features you'd expect in this type of device. There's a large 176x220 pixel 1.9" display, twin cameras (VGA resolution for stills, CIF for video), two way video calling, multimedia playback (including MP3, MPEG4, AAC, MIDI, WMV), MMS, POP3/IMAP4/SMTP email, Java for games and other applications, removable Transflash memory, PC synchronisation, built-in speakerphone, voice recognition and of course 3G services such as streaming video.

Usefully, the Motorola C975 has tri-band GSM support too, whereas most 3G mobiles only have dual-band. There's no Bluetooth on this phone, but then it is marketed as a budget phone. Theres no GPS (global positioning system) either, unlike the A925, but does anyone really need that?

It's a fairly attractive phone too, and looks a lot less ugly than the early Motorola 3G offerings. All-in-all, this is a competitive 3G handset that should sell well. There's also a related clamshell, the V975 with a similar specification (see below)

Motorola V975

Similar in many me ways to the C975, the V975 is a mass market 3G phone in a clamshell format. Featuring a large 176x220 pixel 65,000 1.9" colour display on the inside, a small 1.0" 96x80 4096 colour display on the inside, twin cameras (VGA resolution for stills, CIF for video), up to 256Mb of removable TransFlash memory.  All the other specifications are essentially the same as the C975 - in other words, a 3G phone with all the important features that people will want.

In design terms, the V975 looks a bit utilitarian with a bland design that doesn't quite seem to work with this clamshell. But as most 3G phones are ugly ducklings it probably doesn't matter so much.

Both these handsets are good, mass-market 3G handsets and are very competitive with the offerings from LG and NEC, and should sell well if appropriately bundled with a 3G tariff.

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