Motorola C375

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Motorola C375

Gagan Gupta, Jan 08, 2004 0000 hrs IST

The C375 is one of Motorola's six recently launched low to mid-budget mobile phones.

Small size, Decently priced

Bad overall layout, Slow functionality

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The C375 is one of Motorola's six recently launched low to mid-budget mobile phones. As it has been noticed with most recent Motorola releases, we could expect more emphasis on the looks rather than functionality. And that's exactly what we got.

Looks
The Motorola C375 comes bundled with just the battery, charger and the manual. No headset, no data cable and no CD-ROM for the necessary software.

The phone looks cute and compact as it stands at 100 x 44 x 22 mm and weighs 92 g. The front and the side transparent colour panels indicate that the phone is meant to be used as a style accessory more than a true utility phone, which is quite sad considering that the excess panel space could have been easily used for a bigger display or a more comfortable keypad.

The C375 sports a 96 x 65 pixel, 4096 colour LCD display, which may be ok for a phone if it used the space well, but with the gigantic fonts and the pixelated overall display it was a bit too cluttered. Besides the display matrix outlines are too visible for comfort and make the colours look washed out. This display would probably be appealing to users who are upgrading from an ultra-low budget phone.

The second area of discomfort was the numeric keypad. Though the navigational buttons were well placed and quite comfortable to an extent, the numeric keypad was quite uncomfortable. Typing quick SMS messages gets a little tardy after a while because of the small sized buttons and the lack of distance between them. For other basic functions, it works pretty well though as long as you don't have much typing to do.

Overall the phone is quite decent visually, with the kind of looks that may appeal to young girls and probably a few queer men.

Features
Being the stylish phone that it is, the Motorola C375 is loaded with multimedia features like themes, pictures, and ringtones. The static pictures can be used as wallpapers on the phone and the animated ones as screensavers. Selecting a theme changes all the multimedia features to match the theme, which you can customize to your liking if you want. The ringtones are polyphonic midis, which you can remix using the MotoMixer mode. Extra theme contents like wallpapers, and ringtones can be downloaded via GPRS or through the data cable.

Besides SMS, the C375 also supports MMS and EMS and supports connectivity using GPRS. It also supports Java games and applications.

The C375 features three pre-installed Java games, namely DJ Colette, Kick Champion, and Mahki. Kick Champion and Mahki are the highlights of the games section with their tremendously simple and addictive gameplay and high production value. You can easily spend hours on these games whenever you have the time to kill.

Other utilities include a calendar, a calculator that supports currency exchange and an alarm.

Though the phone is not at all bad with its features, it does have a slow-down problem that tends to get frustrating after a while. Just accessing your images ends up being a loading nightmare. You may even get frustrated with the slowdown while playing the games.

Bottom Line
The C375's basic functions were well in place, with clear voice quality and good network reception. The battery life is pretty good too; you can expect it to last for four days of regular usage.

With a price like Rs. 7,495 with bill and warranty (under Rs. 7,000 street price), this phone is a mixed bag. If you're looking for something that boasts more style than functionality, and if a colour screen stands above everything else then this phone may just about suit your purpose. But if you are into heavy messaging or if functionality matters the most to you then you may want to skip this one.

Test Unit Sourced From: Motorola, India.