Motorola's new Motofone F3 is the phone many people are looking for -- a handset without all the fancy-pants extras built in. It makes calls, does text messages and that's it.

There's no camera, no Internet access and none of that multimedia nonsense. It's also very slim and has the longest battery life we've seen in ages.

This is a really slim phone—its just 9mm thin, which is the thinnest from Motorola, though not as thin as the Samsung Ultra Edition 6.9 (which has a 2-megapixel camera and MP3 playback support). But for its price, the F3 is the slimmest yet. It has a flat keypad with raised lines demarcating the rows. I felt that those lines came in the way when using smaller keys like the OK/Menu key and the dedicated phone book key, but not for the rest of the keys. The fact that the keys are flat and not cut outs should prevent the dust from entering the phone. This is a pleasantly attractive phone to look at, and equally pleasant to hold

The candybar phone from Motorola is the first mobile to use electronic papers in its screen. The alphanumeric monochrome display measures 34 x 43 mm and features extra large character font size. As Motorola named this technology, ClearVision provides the phone's display with a good visibility outdoors because of its extremely high contrast. The supplier of this technology was E Ink Corporation, a well-known manufacturer of electronic paper displays. Besides the good visibility in brighter areas, the new tech offered Motorola the possibility to replace the usual glass display with a thinner one made of plastic.

The keypad's backlighting system is the only thing that illuminates the display in darker areas, which makes it a very low power consumer. Unfortunately, because of the extra large font size the screen can only display two rows of text which makes it rather unpractical for SMS-ing or text reading. A strange feature of the screen is that if you take out the battery it will still display the last readable characters before cutting the power.

Obviously, the phone doesn't feature anything that could resemble a camera. Again understandable if we think that with a camera, the low-end phone wouldn't be one of the cheapest handsets available on the market at the moment.

The official numbers for the 800 mAh Li-Ion battery included are 300 hours in standby mode and 4 hours and 30 minute of talk time. Actually, the phone's battery lasted a little bit over 5 days with about 20 minutes of talk time everyday. Overall, the performance was good, but we haven't expected any less, because the phone has been developed as a low power consumption device.

The only way to communicate with the dual band (GSM 900 / 1800) handset, besides calling someone, is through SMS. Less practical than other phones that feature an LCD display, text messaging with this mobile could be a pain because you won't be able to read/write more than six characters in a line. Other than that, there are no other connectivity features, but those that will buy the phone won't need any of those.

For a low-end phone, the signal reception is pretty good, but we have experienced some distortions of the sound when speaking on the phone

The MOTOFONE's user interface is remarkably simple. The Action key in the upper left corner selects an item, the Navigation pad scrolls through them and that's pretty much all there is to it. There's a dedicated key for the SIM card address book, a call and hang-up button plus a standard number pad and that's it.

The main menu options are:

Write messages
Read messages
View recent call list
Change ringtone
Set alarm
Adjust date and time
When you turn the FONE F3 on, it asks you if you want to use voice prompting. This is a pretty advanced feature for such a simple phone.

You can also set nine quickdial numbers, use a speakerphone while in the call and there's a keylock, vibrate function plus a number of other functions, the more advanced of which will require looking in the manual.

When texting you'll find that the FONE F3 displays in mixed case, but actually only sends in lowercase. The MOTOFONE lacks any predictive texting, but then this would add to the cost.

The speakerphone and ringing tones are quite loud and should be useful in most environments.

Remember that this is a very simple phone - there's no web browser, Bluetooth, MP3 player or even a colour display. You can make calls, deal with text messages, set an alarm and really that it.

The MOTOFONE F3 is based on the SCPL platform. SCPL is a new platform by Motorola that will pave the way for devices a lot thinner and sleeker providing better quality audio and network reception, and also extremely low power consumption. The devices will also offer options for a special user interface for different regions and a low price. The SCPL devices will also run a (heavily) trimmed version of Linux, instead of the proprietory P2K OS found in all Motorola phones (except the ones that already run Linux). If you want to make an association, an SCPL ('scalpel') is a more refined version of a RAZR ('razor'), and that’s exactly what this line of phones is trying to convey.