Motorola V400p

Cancelled
11th February 2004

At first glance the Motorola V400p looks a lot like other Motorola clamshell phones on the market. Pretty enough, but frankly you'd have a hard time telling them apart.

The V400p is a derivative of the V400 which is already available in the US and it shares pretty much the same specification as the very similar V300 and V500 series phones.

However, the catch is that this is only the second phone to be announced in Europe that supports Push-To-Talk (PTT) which allows low-cost walkie-talkie style calls to be made to individuals or groups over the GPRS network - this is what the "p" designation stands for after "V400". The first phone announced to do this in Europe is the rather different Nokia 5140.

Both Nokia and Motorola are betting that PTT is going to be big.. well, biggish. Neither have exactly gone out of their way to create a phone that's stunningly different from anything else, and indeed the V400p plays down the "differentness" and has created a phone that it broadly acceptable to wide variety of users. Compare this with the Nokia 5140's rather strange rubbery ruggedness and it looks like Nokia have missed the mark.

Another slightly unusual feature on the V400p, but one that a lot of similar Motorolas share is quad-band capability. This is primarily useful for roaming in certain parts of the Americas that tri-band phones don't cover. Not a huge issue for Europeans, but it's something that's nice to have.

The rest of the provisional specifications on the V400p are pretty mainstream but competent. There's a 176x220 pixel display in 65,000 colours, a VGA-resolution camera, 5Mb of internal memory, MMS, GPRS, email, WAP, Java application support, MIDI, WAV and MP3 polyphonic ringtones and a small external display. There's no infra-red or Bluetooth, connection to a PC is by a cable only. It measures 86x46x23 mm and weighs 125 grams, talktime is 3.5 to 7 hours depending on network, with 5 to 9 days standby.

Will Motorola be able to sell the V400p as a marketing concept? Predictions are difficult.. after all, nobody really expected SMS to take off when it was bundled with GSM phones as an afterthought. Camera phones were a little slow to take off because initially hardly anyone had an MMS phone, but no they're all the rage. We predict the same for PTT - it's only really useful if someone else has a PTT phone. However, we can see a lot of businesses going for the Motorola V400p to keep costs down and add flexibility for their mobile workforce. We'll see!