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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