Motorola Renew W233

The Motorola Renew is a very basic candy-bar cell phone with a green-colored body made from recycled plastic water bottles and a carbon footprint of zero achieved through the purchase of carbon-offset credits. The phone is inexpensive, and reviews say it has good performance on phone calls. The only review we found that tests battery life (InfoSync) got about an hour more than the promised nine hours of talk time, which is outstanding in general, but especially for a cheap phone. With the recycled-bottles element, the Motorola Renew W233 is in a class by itself. An article on PC World's website describes other green cell phones, but the others are more about energy-saving than eco-friendly construction. If you're more interested in cheap than green, reviews generally favor the Pantech Breeze as the top basic cell phone.

The bad news is the Renew has few features beyond calling and texting (on what CNET describes as a cramped but usable keypad). As InfoSync's Philip Berne writes, the Motorola Renew W233 "does almost everything poorly," and in some cases not at all. There is no camera, for instance. There's no support for instant messaging and email. There's a web browser, but reviews say it's slow and you'll strain to view it on a 1.6-inch, very low-res screen. There's a music player, but no Bluetooth. The Samsung Renew has a microSD memory card slot, which is something that a lot of cheap cell phones lack, but it's behind the battery, which reviews describe as an annoyance.  

We found the best review at InfoSync, which tested battery life unlike CNET, which usually doesn't skip that step. Some usual go-to sources like PCMag.com and ConsumerReports.org have yet to weigh in at all. We found just a couple of user reviews at CNET and PhoneScoop.com and none so far at Amazon.com.