Motorola V535

Discontinued
16th October 2004

Motorola's recent annoucement of six new handsets was accompanied with scant details about specifications, even though all the handsets are based on a similar platform. The Motorola V535 is a typical phone in this lineup, but unlike most of the other V5xx series, this isn't tied to a particular carrier.

One odd thing about the V535 though is that the only photographs available initially appeared to be of the Motorola V300. In fact, the exterior of the V535 is identical to the V300 in almost every details, and the phone comes in two colours, blue and black, so the blue V535 is indistinguishable from the outside from the blue V300.

Inside, it's a different story. The V535 is a dead ringer for the rest of the V500 series, using the V5xx keypad instead of the V300 one. Although this shows some consistency in design across the range, it hardly marks the Motorola V535 out as an innovative phone in design terms. You can see some promotional pictures of the V535 below.

In technical terms the Motorola V535 is competent but pulls no surprises. The familiar 176x220 pixel 65,000 colour display is included, the standard VGA resolution camera, Bluetooth, quad-band GSM, GPRS and Java. The V500 series screen has a good reputation for quality, and we like the fact that Motorola include Bluetooth as standard on most of their phones.

Major improvements on the V535 are in the multimedia area, with the phone featuring video capture and playback, plus MP3 and MIDI ringtones. Internal memory is limited to 5Mb with no way to expand it. All the usual V5xx series are included, such as a WAP 2.0 XHTML browser, email client, MMS messaging and picture caller ID.

Physically, the V535 measures 89x49x25mm and weighs 112 grams, making it a slightly thick and heavy handset compared with some recent clamshells. Talktime is between 3.5 and 7.5 hours depending on settings, with up 10 days standby time.

Like the other new V5xx series phones, the V500 is competent rather than exciting. Although attractive in design terms, and with a good screen and Bluetooth, there's still no megapixel camera in any of these phones and no removable memory. However, Motorola look likely to push sales of the V535 quite hard with a fairly raunchy advertising campaign ("Motoflirt") which is pictured to the right, so we could be seeing quite a few V535s hitting the streets.

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