The Motorola W490 is simple and sleek in design, while supporting a host of features for the common user. It has a slender shape with dimensions of 3.89 by 1.89 by .68 inches. It weighs in at 3.7 ounces, which makes it a bit heavier than most flip phones. However, the added weight also provides for a sturdy, solid feel.

It has an external display that supports 65,000 colors. This display shows the date, time, battery life and signal strength. It also shows photo Caller-ID. The internal display is 1.8 inches with a resolution of 262,000 colors and it supports 176 by 220 pixels of resolution. The colors show up sharp and vivid.

The Motorola W490 sports a four way toggle with a central OK button. It also has a web browser shortcut. The toggle can also be used for one touch access to a range of user defined functions. While the phone is pretty basic, it does include many of the essentials, such as text and multimedia messaging, a world clock, Bluetooth, USB mass storage, email and instant messaging.

The 1.3 megapixel camera is disappointing at best. It takes pictures in four different resolutions and three quality settings. The Motorola W490 has five lighting modes that include a night option and exposure metering. Despite all these features, it has two major drawbacks. It does not have flash, and the actual picture quality is poor.

The Motorola W490 sports a miniUSB port on the right side. There’s 5 MB of built-in memory available, which can be extended via microSD cards.

Pros

* Bluetooth

* Voice commands

* Speakerphone

Cons

* The camera has poor quality

* Low internal memory

Overall

The Motorola W490 is a phone for the no nonsense user. It is simple to use and does what it is designed to do, make calls. The camera is a nice touch, but it will not blow other phones out of the water. It is a solid quality phone and is one of the more affordable ones on the market.