Review Of Motorola W490 – Black (T-Mobile)

REVIEW:
Motorola now days throw much of its weight behind its new Razr2s, but it has given us a series of models that emphasize basic features and dependability rather than flashy designs and high-end offerings. And now we focus on the Motorola W490 built for T-Mobile. The W490 has got simple and easy to use design with some basic features. On the downside it has rather abysmal camera and somewhat tinny voice quality. But it’s a solid phone on most fronts. The price of the W490 is not that much and easily affordable for the users.

W490 sports a design same as the Motorola Krzr K1. It has the same slender shape with similar dimensions as the Krzr K1. The W490 is boxier with sharper angles. It’s a bit on the heavy side but it has a sturdy construction and a solid feel in the hand. W490 has a square external display that supports 65,000 colors. It also shows signal strength, date, battery life and time. It also shows photo caller ID. On the left spine are the standard Moto smart key and a volume rocker. On the right spine is a voice-dialing button. Just above the external display is the aforementioned camera lens. The speaker is on the rear face of the W490. Also on the right spine is the mini USB port.

The W490′s internal display supports 262,000 colors. The menu interface shows Moto’s standard design. The graphics are sharp and colors are bright. You can’t change the text size but you can alter the backlight time and brightness.

The controls are covered in metal (like the Krzr) rather than the rubbery soft-touch material found on the Verizon handset. The navigation array on the W490 has the same basic design as on the other Motorola handsets like the W385. There’s a four-way toggle with two soft keys, a clear button, a central OK button and the Talk and End/Power controls. Though the metal finish means that the keys are a tad slippery, they’re relatively easy to use. The keypad buttons are flush with the surface of the phone, but there are tactile lines between the individual keys. Both the keypad buttons and the navigation array are brightly backlit.

The W490 has a 1,000-contact phone book with room in each entry for six phone numbers, a URL, a birthday, three e-mail addresses and two street addresses. You can also save callers to groups or pair them with a photo and one of 42 polyphonic ringtones and alert sounds. There are some other basic essentials that include an alarm clock, a world clock, text and multimedia messaging, USB mass storage, instant messaging, e-mail, a vibrate mode, Bluetooth and voice commands.

The W490 has got a good camera that takes pictures in four resolutions. There are some other camera options as well that includes five lighting modes including a night option, an 8x zoom, four shutter sounds plus a silent option and three quality settings. On the downside there is no flash in the camera. The camcorder shoots clips in three resolutions with sound. Editing options are similar to the still camera, and clips only last 15 seconds. The photo quality is disappointing to say the least. You can also personalize the W490 with a variety of screensavers, wallpaper and you can write your own greeting.

SPECIFICATIONS:

GOOD FEATURES:
1 Long battery life.
2. Easy to use.
3. Can use up to 2GB micro-SD card.
4. Sturdy and durable mobile.

BAD FEATURES:
1. Picture quality is poor.
2. Texting, emailing & web browsing is not very easy.
3. Screen is small.
4. Bad call quality.

MAIN POINT
The Motorola W490 has a simple design with a solid range of features. It has a poor camera with shoddy photo quality. Its internal memory was rather low, and voice quality sometimes sounded tinny. So I give 2 stars out of 5 stars to it.