The Motorola MPx200 started some of the craze of smartphones that are currently on the market today. It was one of the first non-PDA phones to use the windows mobile operating system.

Looks: Looking at the phone it comes in a very understated black finish with a blue face and an external display that displays the basics, time and battery life. The phone itself is a very attractive clamshell, however, the black finish does tend to attract a lot of smudges and gets dirty very often. The phone also is a bit on the heavy side and people that carry their phones in their pockets will notice the weight.

Performance: Being one of the first clamshell smart phones on the market one would expect the Motorola MPx200 to have some shortcomings. While having Windows Mobile on your phone is great, you use activesync to sync your contacts and email can be imported via Outlook, transfer times can be a bit slow. Unfortunetly, transfer times aren't the only thing that are slow. The Windows Mobile OS can be very slow at times and after extended periods of use, it crashed alot. Not only did the OS crash but sometimes hard resets were required. The hard resets came as a major inconvience because contacts had to be reimported. Also, I was using an unlocked version of the phone on Cingular's network in Pittsburgh, PA. My phone signal would never be at full strength, the phone also missed a plethora of calls along with dropping calls and not being able to hear users on the other end.

Multimedia: The phone itself is not a multimedia powerhouse but is serviceable. The phone comes with an SD/MMC slot and using a 512 MB memory card was no problem. Using activesync it was easy to drag and drop mp3 files onto the phone although like mentioned above, it was very slow.

Overall, I cannot recommend the Motorola MPx200, while it is an attractive phone and does have some redeemable qualities it is a pain to deal with on a day to day basis and is something you worry more about than enjoy.

Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 299.00
Recommended for: Adventurous Technophiles - Tough and Durable