Motorola W755

Reviewers are hot and cold when it comes to the Motorola W755. On the one hand, there's the great low price, made even more impressive by an array of multimedia features. On the other hand, there's almost everything else. Disappointments abound, with complaints about the quality of phone calls, photos, video and design. PhoneScoop.com's Stewart Wolpin writes, "The question becomes how much you're willing to overlook or give up for Verizon's low discounted price." In comparisons with the Samsung U550, the U550 wins out for having better call quality at a similar price range. Our research, however, reveals that the U550 costs significantly more than the W755, potentially making the comparison an unbalanced one.

The Motorola W755 is a basic flip phone, and reviewers say the phone is a nice improvement over the Razr. Unlike other clamshell phones, the top of the W755 rests slightly behind the bottom when opened; CNET's Kent German writes that although it doesn't bother him, he has heard grumblings about it. Some reviewers find the 1-inch and 1.9-inch displays to be unnecessarily stingy, as there's plenty of room for larger screens. Keypad and button layouts are described as attractive but ill-conceived -- the flat keypad and navigation buttons make for frequent misdials. Further, the phone is lacking a music shortcut key, something that PhoneScoop's Wolpin criticizes at length. Also universally panned is the inconvenient placement of the microSD slot, which is behind the battery.

Call quality earns lukewarm feedback. Reviewers describe it as adequate but offer a variety of reasons why it's not great, such as a hollow quality to voices, background noise, distortion at higher volumes and inadequate volume at anything lower. Music quality is described as similarly poor, and while critics like the V Cast with Rhapsody music service, they find it difficult to set up. Video quality is subject to some disagreement between reviewers; CNET and PhoneScoop.com's articles both describe video quality as jerky, pixilated and poor overall, while MobileTechReview.com's Tong Zhang says video looks OK on the tiny internal screen. The phone's 1.3-megapixel camera produces photos that are deemed unusable -- dark, blurry and grainy -- and experts find that the no-frills web browser is unable to render large HTML pages. In expert tests, the battery meets Motorola's quoted talk time of around four hours, but on PhoneArena.com's user reviews page, many contributors say that battery life is far shorter. In the end, reviewers find that the W755's drawbacks roughly balance out its positive attributes -- not the least of which is price -- and give it a hesitant thumbs-up as an adequate, basic phone for low-tech, multimedia-centric users.