Motorola W315 Prepaid Cell Phone Review - Organizer

Richard Baguley
Published on December 29, 2007 Comment on this

Synchronization Ease of Use (0.0)
The W315 doesn't offer any options to synch data with a PC or Mac.

Alerts (5.0)

Events in the calendar can be set to sound the alarm 5, 10, 30 or 60 minutes, one day or one week before they occur. There's also a custom setting that allows you to specify how many hours before the event the alarm sounds. You cannot, however, set the alarm sound from within the calendar application; you only get to set one alert sound in the settings section of the phone. So, you can't have different alerts for different tasks (or different types of tasks). As there is no to-do application, you can't set alarms for a task.

Over the Air PIM Sync (0.0)
The W315 does not offer any over the air PIM synchronization; there is no way to synchronize data over the cellular network.

Address Book

Adding Contacts (3.25)

We test the speed of adding contacts by timing how long it takes to add 5 sample contacts to the phone, then averaging the time. The W315 took an average of 30.8 seconds to do this, which is a little slower than most other phones with keypads. The W315 is held back by two problems: the keypad is a bit slow to enter text, and the phone puts an extra step in the process by asking if the new contact will be for a phone number or an email address; you can't skip this and go straight to the contact. And, with the phone being somewhat slow to respond, this extra step slows the process down.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Motorola W315 on Verizon	30.8	3.25
LG Chocolate VX8550 (on Verizon)	20.5	4.88
Motorola Razr V3m	27.9	3.58
BlackBerry Curve 8320 on AT&T	14.10	7.09
Nokia N75	22.84	4.38
T-Mobile Dash	13.44	7.44

Looking/Sorting/Search (0.5)
There are no real search features on the W315: all you can do is to scroll up and down the list to find the contact you're after, or skip to a letter on the list by pressing the appropriate key. But that's it; you can't search for a particular name or contact. This is likely to get pretty tiresome if you have a lot of friends, as you can't do anything to speed up the process.

Fields (1.8)
The W315 only offers a limited number of fields; name, phone number, category, type, voice name, ringer ID, picture and options for additional phone numbers and email addresses. That's a pretty limited selection; there are no options for address, company name or any free-form fields that can be adapted as required.

Speed Dial/Voice tags/Voice command (4.0)
There are 9 speed dial locations that can be set to particular numbers or contacts. Contacts can also have voice tags attached, where you record the name of the contact and it plays back the name as you scroll down the list. This can also be used as a voice dialling feature; hit the button on the side, say the name and the W315 tries to match the name you say with the voice tag. We only had limited success with this, though; it only records a couple of seconds for each contact, which means you can only use the first or last name for most people. This is a problem if you know several people with the same first or last name. The voice command feature was also spectacularly ineffective; it didn't recognize a single one of the sample contacts that we use.

Calendar

Adding Calendar Items (4.27)
For this section we test how long it takes to add a new calendar item. The item is a simple appointment to remind us that we have a lunch appointment tomorrow. This took an average of 23.4 seconds on the W315, a rather long time. The delay was caused by the fact that the calendar is buried several clicks deep within the menu, under the tools option.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Motorola W315 on Verizon	23.4	4.27
LG Chocolate VX8550 (on Verizon)	6.48	15.43
Motorola Razr V3m	22.60	4.42
BlackBerry Curve 8320 on AT&T	6.04	16.56
Nokia N75	19.20	5.21
T-Mobile Dash	7.38	13.55

Calendar Views (2.1)

Only two views are available on the W315; the month view and a simple day view. In the month view, If you click on a particular day, the application shows a list of the events on that day (or provides an option to add a new event if there are no events on that day). However, there is no day view that shows the length of events for that day, no week view that shows 7 days at a time and no way to view a list of upcoming events.

Fields (6.0)
Only a small number of fields for events are available; title, start time, duration, date, repeat and alert. There is no way to set an event to cover an entire day (the longest an event can last is 4 hours) or to categorize events.

ToDo/Tasks

Adding ToDo/Task (0.0)
There is no to do application on the W315; the only way to organize tasks is to store them in the calendar.

ToDo/Task Sorting and Prioritizing (0.0)
Not applicable: you cannot create to-do or task lists.

Fields (0.0)
Not applicable: you cannot create to-do or task lists.

Notes

Adding Notes (0.0)
There is no specific notes application on the W315; the closest you get is a notepad application within the phone program that allows you to note down numbers, then attach them to contacts. But this will only work with numbers: it cannot handle text.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Motorola W315 on Verizon	n/a	0.00
LG Chocolate VX8550 (on Verizon)	33.80	1.48
Motorola Razr V3m	n/a	n/a
BlackBerry Curve 8320 on AT&T	14.8	6.76
Nokia N75	15.52	3.22
T-Mobile Dash	n/a	n/a

Note Interface (0.0)
There is no note application on the W315.

Note Formatting (0.0)
There is no note application on the W315.

Voice Memo (5.0)
The W315 does have a voice memo application: this can be used to capture short voice notes. These notes are saved by the time and date that they were recorded, but they can't be renamed or copied to another location. This limits the usefulness of this feature, as all you can do is play the recordings back. And you'll need to be quick about it: the W315 can only hold 4 minutes of recordings.

Previous Next

Reviews | About WI | Staff | Advertising |