Motorola T720

We spend a lot of time with our mobile phones, so a good way of passing the time of day without incurring any call charges is to play the built-in games.

Motorola's dual-band T720 supports J2ME, a version of Java that is increasingly popular among mobile phone manufacturers, and which should in time create an army of downloadable software. There is 1MB of memory for storing downloads.

The T720 has two screens. With its flip-lid closed, a small display on the front provides the usual information about incoming calls. The screen inside the flip cover is more innovative. It has a resolution of 120 x 160 and 4,096 colours.

This is where you'll play games and the phone comes with three. Breakout and Tetris are what you might expect from a mobile, though with enough colour and speed to keep interest levels up longer than usual. The third game, MotoGP, a pretty addictive motorbike racing game, really shows off what the phone can do.

Motorola makes some well designed and some poorly designed phones, with the T720 in the former category.

The ergonomics of use are excellent: a four-way directional cursor, twin select buttons and a main menu key might sound like overkill but they work well together, while the on-screen icon menu system is really intuitive.

The flip-open design means the phone is compact and if you don't like the silver finish, you can swap the front and back covers for something you do like. You can also customise the wallpaper for the larger colour screen, screensaver or ringtones (polyphonic tones are supported).

Other key features include a WAP browser, EMS (essentially text messaging with multimedia features), a 500-name phonebook, Pop3 email and the ability to synchronise it with your PC. Talktime is 168 minutes, standby up to 165 hours.

The T720 makes a remarkably good games machine, but as a phone it's a lot more than a glorified pocket console. With a contract, it isn't even overly expensive.

DETAILS
Price:
With Orange contract - £120
Without sim card - £250

Contact: Motorola 0800 015 1151
www.motorola.co.uk