Motorola V360 Preview

Available now
14th February 2005

At first glance the Motorola V360 looks like just another clamshell handset, but it introduces several significant new features that we may see in upcoming Motorola clamshells.

Cosmetically speaking this is the first Motorola clamshell we've seen that has an internal antenna. The exernal display is also larger, and the V360 has broken away somewhat from the very curved designs common to the V300, V400 and V500 series.

Being a V300 series phone, you would expect this to be fairly basic in terms of specifications, but this is where the V360 comes up with a big surprise, because not only does it play back MP3s but it also comes with support for TransFlash memory, upgradeable to 256Mb, Bluetooth, EDGE and PTT. On the downside, it only has a VGA resolution digital camera, but it does have video capture. The Motorola V360 also comes with a WAP browser and supports Motorola's "Dynamic Idle" information display system.

These are high end features, but it doesn't appear that the V360 is a particularly high end phone. The handset's release is slated for Q4 2005 (or perhaps later), and it does indicate that these will be standard features in Motorola phones in 2006 and beyond. If that's the case, then the V360 could be a much more significant handset than it first appears.

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