Motorola MOTOFONE F3 review: Budget wonder

Motorola Fone F3 or Motofone is a unique mobile device. It unites the latest modern trends, on one hand, and a very basic functional menu, on the other.

Key features

* modern slim design
* good keypad
* solid construction
* high contrast display with large font
* long lasting battery
* voice help
* alarm clock
* very basic functions
* extremely low price

Main disadvantages

* segmented display – only six letters in line
* certain characters and symbols are difficult to read
* does not make difference between upper and lower case letters
* some basic characters are not possible to type
* uneven backlighting of the display and the keypad
* 7 pre-installed, non-configurable, and unpleasant polyphonic ringtones

All developed European, far-eastern and American markets are already thicken with mobile phones, so no more turbulent increase of the number of mobiles sold there can be expected in the future. That is why phone manufacturers start to slowly turn their attention towards world destinations of slower-path economic growth, like Africa and India, for example, where mobile phones are still considered expensive. In fact, only very cheap phones with basic functions and simple controls can gain ground in these regions due to their poor economical situation. In this sense, Motofone (its full name is Motorola FONE F3) seems to be the ideal solution for the purpose.

The official presentation of Motofone in the middle of the last year raised a huge wave of public interest. It is a part of a mobile communication development project that is to be carried out in the developing countries. The name of the project is „Connecting the Unconnected“; along with Motofone it also embraces the construction of BTS stations (Base Transceiver Stations) powered by an alternative energy source such as wind energy, solar energy, and biomass.

The slimmest Motorola ever

Motofone’s design follows the latest fashion trends. Certainly nobody had expected the cheapest phone on the market to be only 9 mm thin and thus being the slimmest Motorola ever. The other two dimensions are 114 x 47 mm. Its weight surprises too - meager 68 g. Despite of looking fragile the phone stands bending pretty successfully thanks to the solid and resistant plastic material used for its covers.

The phone is a little bit more resistant than standard average devices, both in terms of firmness and structural design concept. All electronic parts are encapsulated so the device could even resist a mild shower. The latter was demonstrated at Motorola’s presentation show, where mineral water was poured onto the phone; even so it continued to function without problems.

The sides of the phone do not feature any control elements, just the engraved logo of the manufacturer. The only element hidden on the left is a small slot for a charger and a headset. On the top there is a large eyelet for a wrist band.

The rear part of the phone consists of a battery cover, four tiny screws, one in each corner, and the manufacturer’s logo. Once released, the battery cover opens up to the side. It discloses a standard 700 mAh Li-Ion battery. According to the officially published information, after a single charge, the phone should be able to back up 270 minutes of call time or 300 hours on stand-by. We had the opportunity to test Motofone for about a week so we cannot provide you with an objective valuation of its true durability. Nonetheless, our short experience allows us to estimate Motofone might quite successfully last for a week if used moderately. We were quite surprised by the long charging time, though, about 4 hours. The SIM card is inserted in a slot next to the battery; it is very easy to get in or out.

Flat keypad with rubber strips

The front cover is made of a metall-looking plastic different from the one used on the rest of the phone. Motofone is coming on the market in three color versions: black, red, and blue. We had the chance to test the modest among them: the black one. Red and blue look far more interesting.

All keys but the navigation button are integral parts of the front cover and are therefore activated by a press straight onto the plastic area. This eliminates any fear regarding dust under the keys. A protruding rubber strip separates each line on the keypad facilitating orientation. On the whole, typing on Motofone keypad is quite comfortable. When you press on a certain plastic area,the key feedback is sure and positive. Keys are large; typing errors happen seldom.

The functional part of the keypad is dominated by a four-way navigation key without a confirming center. It is made of glossy silver plastic material with eye-catching concentric circles and is slightly exerted above the surrounding surface – much like on the Motorola SLVR L7. The four ways are accentuated by small plastic arrows made of the same rubber material like the strips between the key lines. Next to the navigation key you will also find a call-control key, a key referring to the phonebook, and an arrow-marked context key for option confirmation. Not even here, considering keys manageability, have we got any negative remarks to make.

Backlighting is of worse quality. It is heavily uneven, being the strongest under the lowest key line. The rest of the keypad is illuminated in dazed white. When the phone is moved, one can see how fast backlighting twinkles. However, this does not have any great impact onto common usage.

Display surprising and disappointing at the same time

Motofone’s display is totally innovative. No such one has ever been seen in a mobile phone till today. It employs a completely new technology called „electric ink“, also named EPD in short. Thanks to this technology the display is extremely energy-saving. It only needs energy when visualization needs to be modified. That is why it will continue to show information even if you extract the battery without having switched off the phone in advance.

The EPD technology provides high contrast black & white image, clearly legible even under direct and strong sunlight. Of course, it also bears its drawbacks; for example, light areas on the display feature quite visible black dots and look as if they were dust-covered. Besides, visible information is characterized by evident contours, which only disappear if the display is switched to negative in stand-by mode.

However, our critics do take aim at Motofone’s backlighting, which is not only too weak, but in addition it does not permit any user-modification. In result, display legibility is far better during the day than in twilight or in full darkness.

Let’s now have a look at symbols on the display. It requires a particular explanation as Motofone's display is no typical one: it is not graphic and thus features no specific pixel number. It only consists of fixed icons and two lines of 6 characters in the top. Characters are created by the use of segments, similar to numerals on a digital watch. At the same time the bottom line of the display only manages numbers; letters have their own reserved area: in the top.

Seeing that character creation is limited to the use of particular segments, in the beginning you will probably have image legibility problems. For example, „S“ and „5“ are easy to confuse; there is no difference between „H“ and „#“. The main and worst problem, however, is somewhere else: to our great disappointment, Motofone's display is not able to visualize certain very basic characters, like dot at the end of a sentence, percentage, brackets, slash, exclamation mark etc.

The only characters that can be typed in a SMS along with letters and numbers are hyphen, comma inside a sentence, quotation mark, @-sign, and hash. Any character different from these gets automatically visualized as a hyphen. Can you imagine how ambiguous a text message lacking such characters can sound? Font size cannot be modified, either. When a message is typed on Motofone's display, applied letters look like capital ones. However, if you read a message sent from Motofone on the display of another mobile device, you see lower case letters.

To sum up, our initial excitement about the technology applied in Motofone's display gradually faded away. Its confusing images are a serious drawback.

The signal strength and the battery indicators are constantly visible. They are separated by a Motorola logo situated above the display. The logo protects the speaker.

User interface and control through voice help

At the beginning you may find Motofone's controls rather confusing, but eventually you will understand that your impression paradoxically results from its abnormal simplicity. Avoid trying to find advanced navigation techniques consistent with today’s modern mobile market. Motofone has no matrix menu or context keys. Its functions are intentionally limited to the very essential minimum. In other words, if you are an absolute beginner and you hold a cellular phone for the first time in your life, you should not meet any difficulties controlling the Motofone.

When you switch on the phone and set up the current time and date (you should do so after each extraction of the battery), the phone goes into stand-by mode. The operator name will run across the display. Here you will see a bright clock on black background together with visible icons corresponding to the locked keypad, missed calls and received messages. All mentioned details are fixedly displayed and each new event is immediately announced.

The main menu is accessed through a press on the horizontal way of the navigation key. It is composed of 6 icons located in the bottom of the display. If you do not manage to recognize what functions icons are related to, refer to voice help. According to its voice assistance, Motofone menu consists of: send/read a message, call register, ringtone modification, alarm settings and time settings. And that’s it. Selected options are confirmed through a press on the arrow-marked context key or on the up way of the navigation key. Motofone's menu and control options may cost you some practice and patience, but generally they are really simple.

Voice help (deactivated from the volume settings) tells you how to write a SMS, enter a phone number as well as how to set up alarm time or deactivate it respectively. It will not only be appreciated by people with sight handicap but also by any common user, which makes it one of Motofone's most competitive assets.

It should be possible to set up certain functions through special number codes quoted in Motofone's manual. The latter is said to have only two pages, but we cannot confirm this fact. The phone arrived at our office only accompanied by a charger; besides, our search for the manual on the Internet gave no results.

Telephony is crucial

There is no doubt that Motofone has been particularly created for calling. The rest of its functions are pure extras. The phonebook is very simplified, what’s important here is that you learn to work with it, just like it was in the menu. The phonebook only uses SIM card memory as Motofone has no internal memory. It opens up after a press on the special phonebook key assigned to it. Saved names appear in the top line, while their position on the SIM card is visualized in the bottom one. By pressing the right way of the navigation key you will reach the phone number assigned to the opened entry and the delete entry option. Contacts can be deleted, but not modified.

earching uses first name only and is relatively slow. The way a new number is inserted into the entry list is rather unusual too. It is necessary to write the number on the display as if you were to dial it; then you need to press the phonebook key, enter the corresponding name and confirm it.

Motofone works in GSM networks at 900 and 1800 MHz frequencies (there is a version for the Americas with GSM 850/1900 bands). The sound coming out of the speaker is clear, the maximum volume levels are sufficient. A loudspeaker is available too. On stand-by you can use the horizontal ways of the navigation key to modify ringing volume or deactivate ringing completely if necessary. In any case the loudest ringing is more than sufficient. Melodies are preceded by one-time vibration and get gradually louder. A silent mode as well as an vibration-only option and vibration + the loudest ringing option are available too.

The phone offers 7 ringtones, all of them polyphonic. It is not possible to download any additional ones. It is not clear why in Motofone Motorola forgot to implement the standard ringtones it used in its older models. There is no doubt that those are still pretty popular among Motorola owners. Instead it has built-in a fixed amount of rather unpleasant and pretty identical melodies. What’s worse, when volume levels are set up at maximum, the speaker tends to vibrate too heavily.

Message only if you really have to

Comfort is certainly not one of the characteristics of SMS management in Motofone. The device only offers very basic operations. As we mentioned earlier, messages are typed on a single line, which means that only 6 characters can fit onto the display at a time. Forget about assistant tools like T9 or character countdown. Motofone cannot send messages longer than 160 characters, either. When you type a message, do all your best to avoid making mistakes, because the editor is applicable to the last character only. So if you need to correct the first word of your SMS, you should delete your entire message. Once you confirm the text you have typed, the phone asks you to enter a recipient number or refers you to the phonebook, and then sends it. Notifications of delivered messages are not available here. Besides, the phone does not store sent messages, so if you need to write a message identical to one written earlier, you have no other option but type it once again from the start.

Newly received messages are alerted through beeps and a voice notification. To read them simply press the context key. Motofone stores messages on the SIM card memory only. To browse the Message inbox use the vertical ways of the navigation key; bear in mind it is pretty slow. During browsing the first several characters of each message appear on the display. To read messages press the horizontal keys of the navigation key. SMS can be replied, but cannot be edited or forwarded. Our efforts to set up or modify the number of the SMS center failed miserably.

As you could see from the examples given above, Motofone is not suitable for frequent message typing. SMS should only be written in case of emergency, especially considering the fact that the phone lacks some very basic characters.

Motofone does not feature any entertaining or organizing functions. This, of course, is logically correlated to the lack of a normal display. The phone only offers a simple alarm clock with daily repetition. If you need to wake up at a certain time on only one day of the week, it is necessary that you deactivate the alarm time on the rest of the days. The alarm alone is very loud and quite annoying; you can be absolutely sure it will make you jump out of bed. There is only one type of alarm and this cannot be modified.

For mobile beginners only

Motorola Fone F3 is a unique device, with which Motorola is going to certainly observe a significant vending success, particularly on the developing markets. In Europe mobile beginners and people in need of a cheap alternative phone are the most likely customers. Motofone features a very attractive design; besides, it offers a large font exceptionally useful for senior people. When you decide whether to purchase Motofone, however, bear in mind that it is only suitable for making calls. Do not expect anything more from it. Its display limits significantly restrict full-function SMS management.

Motofone is already being sold on the market for approximately 45 euros. This launching price has been set somewhat high due to the broad interest that the manufacturer expects the phone will enjoy. We, however, expect it to go down to the originally advertised 35 euros. If you are looking for a simple and cheap phone, you may also want to have a look at Nokia 1112. The latter is about 5 euros more expensive, but on the other hand it offers a far greater amount of functions, a graphic display, a full-function SMS application, as well as a simpler and more comfortable control and a friendlier user interface. In terms of fashion, however, Motofone is an absolute sparkler.