Motorola P280 review 1

Introduction

Motorola P280 was the first GPRS GSM enabled phone that was offered by VoiceStream. I am not a Motorola fan at all, but I wanted to try the so called 2.5G(second and a half generation) mobile device. Usually, all previous phones that I have seen manufactured by Motorola were bulky and with a lot less functionality then Nokia phones.
The P280 was introduced in the Q3 of 2001. It is one of the so called world phones – works on 900/1800/1900 MHZ frequencies. For those of you that do not know, most countries in the world use GSM 900/1800 frequency while the GSM carriers in USA use 1900 frequency band. With the P280 you will be able to go anywhere in the world, where GSM coverage exists and be able to connect and talk (if you have roaming enabled)

I was not very excited when I initially saw the P280. There is nothing distinguishable in the design of the phone and I do not think anyone can tell that this is next generation mobile phone.

Display

The first thing that makes impression is the big display – 128x100 pixels. Very neat feature is that you can actually change screen resolution (hit the MENU button, release it, then hit it again and hold it for couple seconds) – from 7 line display, down to 4 line display. The phone has very nice, high contract and can be customized with 6 different contrast settings. The screen uses EL backlight, which is very powerful and does very good job. One thing that I noticed is that the EL backlight stops working from time to time and you have to shake (bump) the phone a few times, so the backlight comes back on.