Motorola MicroTAC 650 Cell Phone

I have used cell phones for the last five years. My first phone was a Motorola 550, the model just before this one. Bizarrely, Epinions does not list this phone as a topic for epinions. Why is this bizarre? Because the 550 is probably the most ubiquitous phone in the world. During its time, it ruled the phone world. Everyone had one.

The 650 did not stand up to these lofty standards. Didn't even try. The 550 had one thing going for it -- it was very rugged. You could break it, but you had to work at it. Regular 'oops, I dropped my phone' incidents wouldn't dent it.

Not so with the 650. In place of the thick plastic flip was a flimsy piece of plastic probably 1/3 as thick. It felt flimsy and was. All this phone had over its predecessor was its battery -- it was smaller, and it was nickel metal hydride instead of nickel cadmium. I dropped mine once, and it was never the same. The microphone was apparently damaged: people had trouble hearing me. I could hear something rattling in the phone.

Battery life for the 650 was OK. About 45 minutes or so of talk time and about three or four hours of standby. This wasn't bad for an analog phone, but digital phones have done significantly better.

This phone also possessed the motorola software (maybe firmware is a better word). It offered a small phone book and one-touch dialing. It had a call timer and lifetime timer. Motorola's phoneware (I'll settle on that term) allowed you to do quite a lot, if you knew which buttons to push.

In this day and age, I cannot recommend this phone to anyone, since analog service is outmoded and digital service and phones have improved markedly over what this phone offered. Even if we were still in the Analog Age, I still wouldn't recommend this phone -- it was too flimsy. My fondest memory of my 650 is watching the Cellular One rep take it away in trade for my new digital phone.