Motorola V171

Discontinued
9th January 2005

Motorola have a wide range of phones including some impressive smartphones, competent and attractive mass-market clamshells, 3G phones for both the US and the rest of the world, and even some nice budget handsets. The V171 is firmly a budget handset, but it's certainly not very impressive in pure technical terms.

The Motorola V171 is basically a slightly warmed over version of the V150, a handset that was looking pretty old fashioned when it was announced a year ago. The V171 retains the V150's tiny 96x65 pixel display in 4000 colours. It supports GPRS, has a WAP 1.2 browser and the usual things like polyphinic ringtones, SMS, EMS and predicitive text messaging plus a few applications. It doesn't appear to support Java, nor does the V171 have a camera or external display. In feature terms, this is a very, very basic handset indeed.

At the time of going to press the size and weight of the V171 haven't been confirmed, but we expect it to be pretty much the same as the V150 at 82x43x22mm and 75 grams - making it one of the lightest colour phones on the market, a fact that does at least forgive some of its basic functionality. Motorola also quote the talktime as a very impressive 5-10 hours with 6-14 days standby time, which is good for such a small phone. Also on the positive side, the interior and exterior of the V171 have been reworked and look much better than on the old handset.

Motorola's projected release date for the V171 is the second half of 2005, by which time it's limited features will look even more out-of-date. Although the light weight and good talktime will appeal to many, we feel that it's not really in Motorola's best interests to be trying to sell handsets that are this basic. In fact, we suspect that it will easily be the most basic mobile phone on the market when it actually makes it into the retail channel, so the only way we can see this selling is if it's really, really cheap.

Target markets are not clear at this point, but the V150 sells widely outside the US to prepay and budget contract customers. The V171 is expected sometime in the second half of 2005.

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