Introduction

Offering high sales from its flip phone segment, Motorola is arguably the king of clamshells. And for those who require more, the Motorola V551 delivers quite a package. Complete with a VGA camera with video recording capabilities, EDGE high-speed transfer rates, and Bluetooth wireless technology, the V551 is perhaps one of the most well rounded phones on the market. All within a very affordable price.

Design

Built with a colorized exterior and perforated metal casing, the Motorola V551 is a sleek and colorful phone. When the flip is closed, the front of the V551 features a blue monochrome external display capable of showing time, call information, battery, and signal strength.

A VGA camera lens sits above allowing users to capture photos at the touch of a button at resolutions of up to 640 x 480 px.

Side keys provide convenient access to regularly used functions. On the left side, a Smart Key gives users another way to perform many basic phone functions. It anticipates the next action users are likely to perform. For example, by highlighting a menu item, pressing the Smart Key will select it.

Volume Keys is able to provide multiple functions as well; increasing and decreasing earpiece volume during a call, turning off incoming call alerts, and increasing and decreasing ringer volume.

Along the right, a Voice Key allows convenient access to enabling voice dialing, or recording voice memos.

Outlets for attaching accessories are along the top and bottom of the V551. Accessory connector and charger ports are located on the bottom, while an outlet jack is available on top to attach headphones.

When opened, the main internal screen is revealed. Displaying 65K colors, the V551's internal screen has a resolution of 176 x 220 px. Navigation through the menu structure is provided through the 5-way direction keypad.

Camera

Unleash the photographer inside. The Motorola V551 contains the same 330K pixel VGA camera found on other Motorola models; able of capturing photos at sizes of Small - QQVGA (160 x 120 px), Medium - QVGA (320 x 240 px), or Large - VGA (640 x 480 px) resolutions, while providing 24-bit color depth at 16 million colors.

When taking pictures, the upper portion of the internal display becomes the viewfinder, while the lower portion shows useful information such as available memory. Up and down navigation on the directional keypad act as the controls for the 4X digital zoom.

While not providing "true" zoom, as optical, the Motorola V551 uses digital zoom which will actually crop the image rather than moving closer, so images will not gain in resolution. Due to the compact size of phones, the moving parts required for optical zoom are not yet available.

Other features allow users to adjust light levels, set self-timers, adjust settings and even edit photos. FotoFun Photo Editor is preloaded on the V551, giving users the opportunity to personalize photos by adding clip art and backgrounds to existing images.

Approximate image file sizes are 50 KB for VGA, 16K for QVGA, and 3 KB for QQVGA. Pictures stored on the internal memory would be dynamically allocated along with other applications and multimedia.

For times when a picture just won't do, the Motorola V551 can record up to 15 seconds of video. The V551 supports the MPEG-4, H.263, and AMR Audio formats for video recording and playback at Sub-QCIF 1 (88 x 72 px), Sub-QCIF 2 (128 x 96 px), or Full QCIF (176 x 144 px) resolutions.

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