“hello, moto.”

It took me a while to realize what the proper parsing of the phrase was. I thought it was something a little less suitable for an audience that includes children… and let me tell you, my experiences with it left me wondering if that wasn’t the correct interpretation.

I was handed a Motorola V600 GSM phone to evaluate after an unusually strong report from one of our veeps.

This phone is a flip phone with a color screen and camera. It supports Internet (WAP) browsing, mobile Java applications, and is Bluetooth-enabled if you want to connect it to a PDA or a wireless headset. Overall, it’s a nice feature set with most of the bells and whistles you can think of, whether or not you need them. But is it practical?

Battery life – I got through almost 48 hours of moderate use of the camera, built-in Java games, and about 25 minutes of phone calls over the weekend. It wasn’t terribly ideal that it couldn’t make it from Friday afternoon to Monday morning, but it’s adequate and relatively reasonable.

Camera – I like the variable zoom (1x/2x/4x). The color response isn’t all that great. The few experiments I tried suggest that the phone handles neither bright nor low-light conditions well.

Internet browser – This is one of things I actually liked quite a bit. The built-in WAP browser performed well, and I saw some nice details on mMode that are not apparent on the Sony-Ericsson T616 (my primary phone).

Java performance – Like many phones coming on the market, the V600 has a Java runtime. I didn’t even try to test for bugs or completeness, but it is a reasonably snappy phone when running Java apps. (The T616 has only marginal Java performance in the R1A054 firmware that AT&T ships on them.)

User interface – The user interface takes some getting used to after using the Sony-Ericsson phones. There seem to be some consistency issues; sometimes you can do a magic navigator push to bring up a particular function, other times you hit one of the softkeys, and still others you hit the menu key. None of it is so maddening to make you want to chuck the phone in the river, but the interface has the feeling of having evolved into its current state rather than designed with humans in mind from the ground up. One bright star, here, though… the iTap text entry system is pretty nice and quite functional. Very useful if you’re flinging out text messages at warp speed. (Unsurprisingly, the name “Motorola” is in its dictionary.)

Bluetooth – Setting up the Jabra headset was a breeze. I had it paired and working in less than a minute. That’s the best I can say here, though. A fairly significant missing feature is the ability to send or receive files, like photos snapped by the camera, via Bluetooth (you have to use MMS or email, pretty much). However, this pales in comparison to the fact that 75 minutes after I had paired the headset, the phone completely lost touch with reality – and the headset. Calls placed were neither audible in the handset itself nor in the headset. Several rounds of diagnosis later I finally decided to shut them both off and start over. This does not inspire confidence.

Call quality – Audio quality was reasonable and largely indistinguishable from other phones. On the other hand, radio performance on this phone is poor. The first call I placed was dropped, and things didn’t get any better from there. This phone’s radio is approximately as good as the Sony-Ericsson T68i… and that is hardly a compliment. (The T616 easily outperforms both the V600 and it’s older cousin.)

If you must have a flip phone, I wouldn’t choose this one. I’m going to give it a big thumbs down because of the radio performance and Bluetooth problems. If Bluetooth is not your thing, save the money; you’re probably looking at the wrong phone if the V600 is a contender, anyway.