Motorola V330

Discontinued
20th December 2004

Back in October we reported on a whole load of new Motorola clamshells, most based on the popular V500 series. Well, it seems that Motorola haven't finished yet, and they are about to announced yet another derivative of the V500 called.. err.. the V330. This handset appears to be aimed exclusively at T-Mobile USA as a straight replacement for the V300.

As in Europe, it looks like T-Mobile have had a hand in messing up Motorola's numbering system. To all intents and purposes, the V330 seems identical to the E550, essentially a V500 series enclosed within a V300 case. From what we can tell, Motorola originally intended to call this handset the Motorola V536, but presumably someone thought the V330 would be a better name. Go figure.

The first and most obvious improvement with the V330 is the inclusion of a V500-style keypad, with a dedicated t-zones and camera button. It's a much more practical keypad without the V300's odd assortment of buttons, but from the outside, the V330 is absolutely identical.

The V330's specifications will be pretty much the same as the rest of the V500 range, with a 176x220 pixel display in 65,000 colours, VGA resolution camera with 4X digital zoom, MP3 polyphonics, GPRS, MMS, instant messaging, email support plus a WAP 2.0 browser. The most notable addition in the new V500-series handsets is video capture, although to be honest we think people might use this exactly once and then get bored with it. Internal memory is 5Mb, which isn't a lot. We don't know for certain if the V330 will have Bluetooth and quad-band GSM, because the V300 and V303 don't have these features, but we suspect that it does, especially since we believe this used to be called the V536 which would give it pretty much the same feature set as the V535.

OK, so this is an improvement over the V300, but it's hardly groundbreaking. When the original V500 was announced in late 2004 it was a class leading handset, but this is basically just a slightly upgraded version. We still think it's a good handset, but it's lagging behind the new class leader, the Sharp TM200 by some way. Perhaps Motorola will reclaim some lost ground with the announcement of the Motorola V635 due in 2005.

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