Introduction

Design

The Motorola T720 is kind of a fusion between Motorola's old school StarTAC and the popular V60. Motorola, as many of its commercials are demonstrating, is trying to cater to the young, hip crowd offering a slew of features and a large, vibrant color screen.

The T720's slim body is comparable to other small phones out on the market today in terms of both size and weight. Taking a page from most other clamshell phones available, the T720 has an external LCD display which shows the time, battery level, signal strength, and in some cases, caller ID.

Continuing to with what's popular, Motorola added changeable faceplates as well - a nice touch and smart move judging from the popularity that similar Nokia's have garnered. However, the plastic does seem to be a bit light and fragile. I'm really not one to abuse my phones but this phone definitely should be treated with kid gloves. Good looking design but maybe they should have considered going with a lightweight metal instead sacrificing weight for durability.

Screen

Internally, the 4,096 STN color screen is beautiful. Everything shows up wonderfully bright and very easy to see. The screen is also slightly larger (8-9 lines of text) than the standard 5 lines offered by similar phones.

This extra space really comes in handy if you're a messaging or gaming fiend - especially games in my opinion. While not as good as the Samsung S105 display, it is still nonetheless a great screen. Also, in sunny weather don't expect to see much.

Controls

Inside, the icon-heavy interface makes things intuitive for the novice user and expert alike. The user interface is exceptional. It makes full use of the directional keypad and the buttons under the display. You even have the ability to customize shortcuts to the numeric keys for quick access to the menus.

If that wasn't enough, you can configure your 6 favorite functions to be accessed in standby mode. One for each of the 4 directions, and 2 from the soft keys. Assigning voice tags to shortcuts is possible too! The combinations are almost endless.

Even easier to use are the phone's large buttons for dialing and menu navigation. While the enlarged number keys makes dialing a breeze, the directional keypad is no good for those that like to play games which was actually the highlight of a few of the T720 commercials on TV.

Battery

The 550 mAh Li-Ion battery charges quickly; just about an hour to fully charge. Unfortunately, using up the battery life is quick as well.

Our tests came nowhere near the minimum rated talk time of 420 minutes. It was more along the lines of 2 hours (120 minutes) but standby time was relatively on target.

Meeting its rating aside, 336 hours of standby is still pretty substandard nowadays. 120 minutes of talk time is almost downright unacceptable. It should also be noted that the CDMA phones seem to drain batteries faster than GSM models. Beware Verizon users.

Minimum Rated Standby Time: 336 hours
Minimum Rated Talk Time: 420 minutes

Many variables, including carrier signal strength at your location, signal consistency (including incoming and outgoing calls), display and ringer settings, and battery charging methods and history, will affect performance. When handset manufacturers and mobile phone carriers list talk-time and standby-time ratings, they usually include disclaimers about variable performance and often refer to the times they publish as maximum times.

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