The Motorola W220 is a budget addition to the popular RAZR clamshell family. Featuring Motorola's now familiar flat keypad with cool blue backlighting, the W220 is a bargain basement phone with limited features. There's no camera, no music player and the screen is a basic colour display with a low resolution. However, there is an FM radio that can be listened to via the speakerphone, or using optional stereo headphones.

The phone comes in a black & silver coloured casing which measures 95 x 46 x 16.7 mm. The clamshell designed handset is coated mainly in plastic which feels good to hold & weighs 93 grams which is a good weight for the user to carry around & manage. The portable handset does not have an external screen but does come with three external icons which are large & bright to get the users attention. The external icon will let the user know of any missed calls, incoming messages & battery status by showing a colourful icon on the external casing.

The W220 includes a 1.5in colour screen with a resolution of 128x128 pixels. It's small, basic and has a poor viewing angle, but is more than adequate to handle the applications included in the phone. Despite the screens small size, dialling numbers uses a large font, so it's easily readable.

The W220 doesn’t have an integrated camera. That’s obvious since this is a budget phone.

Standard battery, Li-Ion 880 mAh
Talk Time: 497 minutes of talk time. It is very good!
Stand-by Time: 290 hours of stand-by time.

There is an FM radio tuner in this phone, which is probably the single deciding factor for most of its users. As usual, it needs the headset to use as an antenna, and the reception quality of the radio signals is great. Even the built-in loudspeaker of the phone works wonderfully. The phone comes with a standard 2.5mm stereo mini-jack handsfree, so even if you lose or break it, you can buy a third party replacement off the shelf, saving you money.

The phone doesn’t support playback of MP3s, neither can you use MP3 ringtones, but you have AMR and the iMelody format. Or you can compose your own using the built-in composer. The ringer is LOUD, but unfortunately, the preset ringtones aren’t very interesting. I couldn’t get myself to use any of those, so I kept the basic conventional ring. There’s one thing I couldn’t figure out here: a lot of the ringtones are short – making them excellent options for message tones—but you can’t use them for message alerts. You can only choose from a set of 5 preset tones, none of which sound interesting.

The W220 supports standard SMS and MMS messaging with Motorola once again using their preferred iTap predictive text input. Despite being an entry-level handset, the W220 features basic multimedia functionality.

A rather odd feature is what Motorola dubs "Lantern mode". This forces the internal screen illuminate white so the phone acts as a lantern if you are ever caught in the dark. Lantern mode lasts for either 30 seconds, one or two minutes, depending on what it is preset to.