Motorola VE240

A basic phone with a few frills, the Motorola VE240 makes a good, simple voice phone for Cricket and MetroPCS users. Kids on a budget will appreciate its basic MP3 player, and drivers will enjoy its robust Bluetooth support. If you don't know Cricket and MetroPCS, they're wireless carries for our recessionary times. The two carriers sell cheap, unlimited-use wireless service in an increasing number of cities nationwide. Typically, their unlimited plans cost half that of other carriers. The downside is that if you want to use a phone outside a Cricket/MetroPCS metro area (see coverage map below), you pay a high per-minute roaming charge.

The VE240 is a good-looking, easily pocketed candy bar–style phone (4.4 by 1.9 by 0.6 inches, HWD) in black with red and silver accents. It feels a little cheap, but then again, it is cheap. The blue-backlit keys are small but usable; the phone's one physical drawback is a very dim 128-by-128, 1.5-inch LCD screen. On the side of the VE240, you'll find buttons for volume, voice dialing, and activating the speakerphone.

As a voice phone, the VE240 is nothing special, but it gets the job done. Reception was very good: The VE240 connected more calls than the Samsung Messager, and connected calls in fringe areas more quickly than the Nokia 1606. Earpiece and speakerphone sound were okay, though both are of moderate volume and a little muddy. There's almost no in-ear feedback of your voice, which could have helped prevent "cell yell." A transmission from a noisy area came through clearly. Battery life is excellent, at 5 hours 44 minutes of talk time on a single charge.

The VE240 has a standard 2.5mm headset jack for wired headsets, supports both mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets, and has very good built-in Nuance voice recognition. It auto-paired easily with a Motorola H15 Bluetooth headset, and you can trigger voice dialing from the headset. Ringtones are loud, and the vibrating alert, while short in duration, is sharp.

The VE240 comes with several games and has a very basic WAP browser that's essentially unusable on the tiny screen. It supports SMS and MMS messaging but not e-mail or IM. The VE240 does have one interesting extra feature: a music player, albeit a very basic one. It plays only unprotected MP3s, and you have to put the files on a microSD card that fits under the battery, where it is awkward to insert or remove. Once you've popped in the card, though, you can move files on and off the phone using a standard mini USB cable. Our VE240 worked fine with an 8GB SanDisk microSD card. Music sounded good over a wired headset and Motorola S9 HD stereo headphones.

The Motorola VE240 makes a good entry-level phone for Cricket and MetroPCS users, and its Bluetooth and voice dialing support are great for folks with cars. I'd feel safe recommending it over the similar Cricket EZ (which has notorious quality problems) and Samsung Spex. The Samsung MyShot SCH-R430 is perhaps a better general-purpose Cricket or MetroPCS phone, but it's more expensive. Thus, for those on a budget, the VE240 will do.

Spec Data

* Price as Tested: $49.99 - $119.99 List
* Service Provider: MetroPCS, Cricket
* Screen Size: 1.6 inches
* Screen Details: 1.6", 128x128 CSTN LCD screen
* Camera: No
* 802.11x: No
* Bluetooth: Yes
* Web Browser: No
* Network: CDMA
* Bands: 850, 1900
* High-Speed Data: 1xRTT

Motorola MOTO W233 Renew

The water cooler has come a long way: First we talked around them, and now we can talk on them. The first cell phone to receive our GreenTech Approved seal, the Motorola MOTO W233 Renew for T-Mobile, is the first U.S. phone whose body is made from recycled plastic—watercooler jugs, in fact. Aside from being very green, it doesn't offer a lot of features, but the Renew is a good choice if all you need is a solid voice-only phone.

PCMag.com's GreenTech Approved standards require that we rate phones on seven environmentally friendly criteria, and the Renew passes with flying colors: It is RoHS compliant (meaning that it doesn't contain hazardous chemicals, like mercury), uses recycled packaging, is made partially from recycled materials, and comes with a postage-paid envelope so you can send back your old phone for recycling. For the time being, at least, we're dubbing the Renew the most environmentally friendly phone on the U.S. market.

A small (4.4 by 1.8 by 0.6 inches, HWD; 2.9 ounces), cute, candy bar–style phone, the Renew features white, green, and black accents. The handset has a rather dim 1.6-inch, 128-by-128-pixel screen, and a standard keypad of stiff, plastic buttons. There's a standard mini USB connector for charging on the handset's right-hand side.

The dual-band (850/1,900 MHz) Renew is an excellent voice phone—and one of the best we've tested on T-Mobile's 2G network. Reception is strong; the earpiece is loud yet clear, and voice quality is exceptionally good—the microphone aggressively cancels even very loud background noise. Voice quality does suffer a bit when the phone pumps up its noise cancellation, but conversations are still very intelligible. The speakerphone is loud enough for indoor or outdoor use, though its mic does let some background noise through. The Renew features a standard 2.5mm headset jack and comes with a stereo headset, but it doesn't support Bluetooth or voice dialing. Ringtones are loud, and you can use your own MP3s. The handset's vibrating alert is also very strong. Battery life is acceptable for a 2G GSM phone, at 9 hours 5 minutes of talk time.

Apart from voice calls, the Renew doesn't do much. WAP Web browsing on T-Mobile's GPRS network is dismal given the low-res screen and large default font (it displays only four lines of 20 characters). You'll run into the same problem with text messaging: You can see only a few words at a time. The phone receives picture messages, though the display isn't great for viewing photos. There's no camera to take shots or create new picture messages, but you can forward images stored in the phone's 1MB of memory. If you want to load JPEG images onto a microSD card, you can get them on the phone that way, but only if they're really small (even images as small as 500 by 666 pixels are too large to render well).

The Renew comes with Sudoku and Tetris games, but it couldn't even install our JBenchmark Java benchmark test suite, so we don't have high hopes for downloading other software. The alarm clock and calculator functions are useful, though.

Although the Renew is touted as a music phone, using it for that purpose is not a pleasure—especially considering that the microSD slot is inconveniently placed underneath the battery. What's more, the phone supports only cards up to 2GB. You can load only MP3 files—no other formats are supported—into the card's Music folder, which the phone creates when you insert a new card. You have to take the card back out, however, to load files via a PC-based card reader, since the phone can't connect with a PC directly via USB. Once your music is loaded, you can browse by song only; there are no sorting options.

The Motorola MOTO W233 Renew is almost too devoid of features to recommend. Even on the most basic of voice phones, I like to see Bluetooth and voice dialing for in-car use. For a more auto-friendly option, turn to the Motorola RIZR Z3, which you can get free with a new T-Mobile contract. But the Renew's low price, strong voice quality and eco-friendly nature could make it a good emergency phone, backup phone, or even a first phone for a teen. Ultimately, despite its lack of features, the W233 Renew gets a green thumbs-up.

Spec Data

* Price as Tested: $9.99 - $59.99 List
* Service Provider: T-Mobile
* Operating System: Other
* Screen Size: 1.6 inches
* Screen Details: 128x128 CSTN LCD screen
* Camera: No
* 802.11x: No
* Bluetooth: No
* Web Browser: No
* Network: GSM
* Bands: 850, 1900
* High-Speed Data: GPRS