This will be a journal of my first few days as a new owner of a V555.

March 25, 2006

As a preface I am a brand new user of the V555 as of yesterday. I use the Dobson Cellular One system in Northern Michigan. I traded up from my V60S and use the phone almost exclusively in my car driving around 33 counties in Northern Michigan.

The V555 upgrades so many things such as Bluetooth, color screen, polyphonic ring tones and SIM card technology.

I have no experience yet using the GSM network to see if I get better reception but I certainly have an opinion so far in the two days that I have been programming the phone.

First of all I decided on this phone 1st because of the decent reputation of Motorola and secondly because I want to use Bluetooth while in my car. Cellular One offered the V190 as free for a two-year contract, but I decided to spend the extra $100 to get this V555 specifically for Bluetooth.

I love the look and feel of the phone. It is much lighter than the V60S that I had (granted- I had an extended battery on that). There are many positives which you can read about here and I will mention as the spirit moves.

Now some clear negatives about Motorola as they are fresh on my mind. The users manual is terrible. It is clearly written by people who speak English as a second language. Basic things are not taught, such as the difference between “phone” and “SIM” phone book entry. It also does not clearly differentiate between “Quick Dialing”, “1-Touch dialing” and “speed dialing”. So they end up throwing vocabulary around with presumptions that we know the differences.

Then the Motorola website is just as bad. Again, their support area is terrible and does not answer obvious and valid questions. I took my phone in the retailer today and they also had no idea how to answer my questions and ended up calling Cellular One Customer Service. Answers were finally answered, but I had to go to all that hassle to get basic questions answered.

It turns out that you cannot program 1-touch dialing in SIM mode. So all 112 of my phone book entries are under “SIM” except for the nine “1-touch” dialing entries. What a hassle.

OK- now for the big disappointment. The power connection jack on the bottom of the phone is the same bad design as their older phones. This connection is terrible and eventually goes bad as ALL my Motorola phone jacks have done. Those 4 prongs on the end of the jack always end up getting dirty or something after about one year and then don’t connect properly. The USB connection on my wife’s new V190 is great, I wish they could have incorporated the same connection on the V555.

I know my negatives are strong, but at this point those are my honest thoughts. Those negatives are not near enough to make me want to return this phone as the positives far outweigh the negatives.

More on the reception and day to day usage later…..