Introduction

Out of the box experience of the V100 personal communicator re-affirms its ability to impress, with its ergonomic design, striking colour, (ours was a Neo-plastic based see-through blue, as featured with the Apple iMac product range), and QWERTY keyboard make up for the slight bulkiness of the product. The QWERTY keyboard makes it effortless to send and receive text messages, a far simple task than conventional phones, which will be music to the ears for those consumers who mostly send text messages rather than using the voice facility. The rubberised keyboard is rather on the small side and must not be mistaken to the ease of use of a PC keyboard, as it will be rather difficult for those of us that have distinctive sausage fingers.

The V100 can easily be mistaken for a PDA, but alas, it is not; it is a wireless phone where WAP and SMS are not added services but ones that are key to the success of the product. Let's not forget the mainstay of the product one of using it to make and receive calls, this however, cannot be done without the accompanying handset, as the V100 most certainly lacks a microphone and speaker. The nature of its design doesn't lend itself to have either feature. This did not cause us any inconvenience and as such it was handy to use the supplied handset, as the product would be hideous to carry around clutched in the palm of your hand. Motorola obviously recognised this fact and has made provisions for this by supplying a holster. The user manual states "Congratulations. The phone will look great when you carry it around in the holster," this we hasten to add is rather debateable. As far as using the V100, there is a clear advantage of having the 2.2 x 1.4-inch backlit screen; making it very easy to view WAP enabled web sites. The WAP functions worked well, all though setting up is a little tricky, and for those of you that do not like reading manuals, we would strongly recommend reading it before embarking to set-up WAP. After reading the manual it took us just under three minutes to get all the features we wanted for WAP functionality. All in all it provides consumers with a distinctive, fun and easy way to communicate.

Next