The MouthPad feature really works! I own a Motorola C650 and very badly wanted to review it only to find it missing on the list of phones. So I used Mouthpad and voila! So here we go...
Why did I buy a C650? In my case if you happen to donate your old mobile to the cleaning staff of Satyam theatre, it is high time to buy a new mobile and the C650 was the best option available!
Attractively priced, this is the one motorola phone which looks most different from the usual boxy motos with small screens. The screen itself is great with 64K colours, however I personally feel Samsung has the best colour screen displays. Before we go into the nitty gritties of the C650 let us have a small brand war.
My first mobile was a Nokia 3310. I really loved it and all of its features and user friendliness. 8 out of 10 Indian mobiles are Nokia phones. I really am surprised because the Indian consumer is perhaps the only price conscious customer in the world who will sacrifice quality for a cheaper product. Trust me Nokia phones are over-priced by a big margin.
Sony Erricson makes some pretty cool phones but the problems I have had with little things have turned me off...like the strange charger which always comes loose during charging, but the K700i is something totally different....KOOL!
Siemens, Samsung and the others I have no personal experience with, though I must say that Samsung mobiles look cheap and more like toys than phones...
Back to the C650...the phone was light weight...triband..had a 4X zoom VGA in built camera...Mp3 and polyphonic ringtones...GPRS...integrated speakerphone...mpeg4 video playback. Available in two classy finishes of Midnight Blue and Rush Silver. The accompanying goodies were a phone tools suite that allowed the phone to be hooked up to your computer (using a USB port) and a timex watch (free assured gift!)...
For someone weaned on Nokia phones I found the transition to Motorola very easy. The user friendliness quotient is pretty high on this one. The camera is pretty cool actually my Mouthshut photo id was shot using the camera and this post being made through the GPRS connection on my C650!
On the flip side is the memory which is a shade over an MB and not expandable (boo hoo!), shared by all the picture files, ringtones and video files. This again is supposedly addressed by the new E398 (Not sure though...) which has expandable memory. The screen too feels a tad small at times.
The games are pretty dumb but I spent more of my time with the camera than the games. The camera is truly great and if you have diffused ambient lighting at an optimum level, you can take some stunning pictures, upto 640x480 in size. The MP3 ringtones (you need to cut a portion of a song you need as a ringtone, encode using a low bit rate and then transfer it to your phone so that you have some space for the other stuff!) have a quality that make you stand out if some one calls you when you are inside a crowded lift (I let it ring for a while before I pick it up!).
All this for a price of 10, 400 Rs which I found very reasonable...I hear the price has gone down some more...But that is the thing with mobiles and girl friends...a better one comes along at a more affordable price if you wait a little longer...