Labs

Motorola's MotoFone F3 is the cheapest phone in the group, and definitely the most unusual. It's a stripped-down mobile, with no extras such as a web browser or MP3 player. It's designed just for making calls and sending texts.

Instead of a backlit LCD screen consisting of a grid of pixels, the F3 has a black-and-white display that forms numbers and letters out of lines, as a calculator does. The screen is easy to see even in sunlight, and with no backlight it hardly

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uses any power. This is the main reason for the phone's astonishing claimed 12 days' standby battery life.

Instead of a menu system, the phone has small icons to represent the phone's options, which you access with soft keys on the main screen. The function of each icon isn't obvious without the manual, but once you get used to them it's easy enough to make calls from contacts stored on the SIM card and to add new numbers. Texting is basic, however. There's no predictive text, and the huge letters and small screen mean few letters fit on the display. This means you have to scroll around to read a text, which makes it hard to understand messages unless they're written in text speak. There's also no settings menu, so to change settings such as disabling keypad tones you have to type in a string of asterisks and a number code.

Motorola's MotoFone F3 is a great idea and is astonishingly cheap for a mobile phone. Unfortunately, its tricky interface and lack of predictive text make it hard to recommend. Nokia's 2310 is worth the extra £10.