Small, sleek, easy to use with plenty of features - Motorola W385 Cellular Phone

Author's Rating:

Pros: Small, Lightweight, No-frills cell phone, Camera, Good reception, Bluetooth

Cons: No-frills might not interest some

The Bottom Line: 
If you are looking for a small, lightweight, easy to use cellular phone with a decent set of standard features, the Motorola W385 is a good choice

Author's Review
Are you looking for a fairly straightforward cellular phone that offers all the standard features in a slim and lightweight package? The Motorola W385 might just be what you want.

This phone is slim, lightweight, easy to fit in your pocket and offers enough features to keep the average user quite content. The phone offers Bluetooth connectivity, the ability to take photos, a built-in speakerphone and plenty of standard features that you’ll find on most other comparable phones.

Choosing the W385

Finding a new phone for my partner is always a challenge. I don’t want to say he is technophobic, but he likes what he likes and that involves something that isn’t overly techy and usually doesn’t have all the latest bells and whistles. So I had narrowed down his choice to a couple of cellular phones that would work for him and he ultimately chose this one, mostly because he liked his previous Motorola phone.

I have to admit that when it arrived, I was a bit surprised. I think I was expecting something more along the lines of a Razr phone and this phone was definitely smaller and less polished than that line of Motorola phones, though it did have that Razr styling, giving it a sleek and fairly smooth look.

That said, even though the phone doesn’t have the bells and whistles of the newest phones, it does offer a decent feature package. More importantly for us, the phone is easy to use, offers good reception and it turns out, is great for him because it’s small enough to easily fit in his pocket, something his older phone wasn’t as good at.

W385 Features

While I say this phone is simple, that’s relative. There are a ton of features on this phone. Some of them are quite useful, others are probably something the average user won’t ever need or use.

Stats
The W385 weights just under 4 ounces and measures about 4 inches in height, almost 2 inches in width and is almost three quarters of an inch thick. It’s light enough and small enough to slip into a pocket and forget that it’s there. It’s also easy to slip into a bag or a backpack or almost anywhere else without too much trouble.

Battery Life
The W385’s lithium-ion battery is advertised as offering about 4 hours of talk-time and up to 440 hours of standby time. My guess is that standby time is wishful thinking – that’s like 18 days! What we’ve found with standard use is that on a full charge you can go a couple of days without the phone using up its charge. As you would expect, the more you talk, the faster the battery goes down.

Since my partner talks a lot and texts a lot, the battery life for him averages about three days. However we don’t usually let it get down that low. He charges it in the car when he’s driving and it’s usually hooked up to the charger at night.

Reception
I’m not sure if it’s the continual improvement of the Verizon network or just the improvements in each generation of cellular phone’s themselves (it’s probably both), but the W385 provided a marked improvement in reception compared to my partner’s old cellular phone. In places that offered patchy or scattered service he can now get a pretty clear signal and in places where the old phone wouldn’t get a signal at all, he can get service, though it’s a bit spotty.

Call clarity really depends on the signal strength. In areas with a strong signal, the phone is very clear and it is a noticeable improvement over the older phone. In areas with a weaker signal there is still the typical interference you’ll get on any call.

Screens
There are two screens on the W385, a small external black and white display along with a larger, color screen on the inside. The 1.8 inch interior screen is bright and displays up to 65k colors. The resolution is good enough to easily view photos you’ve taken with the camera. The screen brightness is quite good and it’s easy to look at in all but the brightest conditions.

The exterior screen doesn’t offer the brightness, color or detail of the interior screen. Its main purpose is to show off the time when the phone isn’t receiving a call. When there is a call, the caller-ID shows on this screen to show you who is calling.

Navigation
One reason he got this phone is because it shares the same general Motorola navigation menus as his older Motorola phone. That way he wouldn’t have to learn an entire new operating system for his phone. So if you already have had a Motorola phone before, you’ll be on familiar ground here.

The menus are accessed through the top keys on the keypad along with a 5-way navigation key that’s in the center of those top keys. This lets you move amongst the menus and select items. It’s not a hard navigation system and it lets you get around to various menus without too much difficulty.

Camera
The VGA camera that is built into the W385 won’t be taking 11x17 portraits anytime soon, but it is fine for quick snapshots and movies. The camera offers 160x120, 320x240 and 640x480 resolutions. The highest resolution is good enough for small photos in emails and on websites. The lower resolutions are good for trading photos on phones. You can adjust a few settings such as brightness and white balance on the camera. Once you’ve taken a photo you can send it to other cell phones with picture messaging or you can email it.

Bluetooth
The Bluetooth connectivity on the phone lets you use it with other Bluetooth compatible accessories such as a hands free headset. We don’t honestly use this feature all that often, but he does have a Bluetooth headset and when he uses it, the connection and the reception between the phone and the headset is fine. The only time we’ve ever used it is in the car and we haven’t had a problem.

Speakerphone
I was a bit disappointed in the speakerphone on this phone. It works, but it just seems to be wimpy. It doesn’t amplify voices all that much and it seems to pick up a lot of exterior noise, more so than other speakerphones I’ve used. For example I can easily use the speakerphone on my LG phone in the car while driving and both my partner and I can talk to and easily hear the others on the line. With the W385, we can hear them but we have to strain a bit even at the highest volume and the people on the other end of the line often complain about the noisiness of the line. In quieter situations though, the speakerphone is more than adequate.

Other Features
The phone supports text messaging (what phone doesn’t?), along with picture messaging, Verizon’s Mobile Web, email, and Mobile IM. You can also access Verizon’s Get it Now service to purchase ring tones, photos, music and various applications. It’s also compatible with the VZ Navigator service that Verizon offers.

There are a couple of built-in applications including a calculator, calendar, alarm clock and notepad. Besides that, there’s also a contact book that lets you store up to 1,000 contacts.

The phone offers quite a few built-in ring tones and has the ability to accept others, so you can pretty much get any ring tone you want for the phone. You can also have the phone vibrate in addition to or in place of the ring tones.

What you get

In addition to the phone, you’ll also get a standard ac power charger, the lithium-ion battery, a user/quick reference guide and a headset adapter. Other accessories like a car charger are extra.

Use and Experience

After several months of use, I have to say that this phone has been working well. For what we use it for, it’s been a good phone and more importantly, my partner hasn’t found a reason to dislike the phone. He’s come to like it after getting over the “it’s a new phone” thing. I think it’s because it’s smaller than his old phone, but just as rich, if not richer in the features that he uses.

Our only two real complaints about the phone would probably be the fact that the talk time doesn’t seem to be as much as advertised and that the speakerphone doesn’t do all that well in marginally noisy situations. We’ve gotten around the battery issue by getting a car charger in addition to the ac charger so that the phone can always be charged and with the speakerphone, we usually use my LG phone in louder situations so we don’t have to worry about misunderstanding the folks we are listening to.

One thing I would have liked to have seen on this phone is a Micro-SD card port. I have one on my phone and I find it to be very useful. It makes it a lot easier to download photos from the cell phone to the computer and saves you from having to incur the download charges from Verizon. This is a minor thing though.

Final Thoughts

I have been really happy with the performance of this phone and I know that my partner has too (otherwise he’d let me know). The phone basically operates as advertised.

It’s small, smooth and sleek, which makes it easy to carry. The navigation is straightforward and the various features generally tend to add to the usefulness of the phone.

Overall I’m glad we ended up with the Motorola W385 Cellular Phone. It’s exactly what I was looking for in a phone for my partner. Something robust enough to meet his needs, but not so fancy that he was lost amongst all the features.

So if you are looking for a small, lightweight, easy to use cellular phone with a decent set of standard features, the Motorola W385 is a good choice to consider.


Need a Car Charger for your W385?