Motorola Adventure V750

The simplicity starts with the design. The 3.9 ounce V750 is a broad flip phone (4 by 2 by 0.7 inches HWD) with a grippy, textured back. It's billed to be ruggedized against shock, dust, and vibration, though the back panel flew off when chucked it at a wall it's no G'zOne Boulder that's for sure. On the front there's a big, clear 1.6 inch 120 by 160 pixel color display with three music control buttons, and a 2 megapixel camera. Flip open the V750 to find Verizon's best keypad, bar none.

The round buttons are very clearly marked and widely spaced. On the main 2.2 inch, 320 by 240 pixel color screen inside, numbers and menu options look big and bright. And the V750 comes set to a simplified menu system that's even easier to navigate than Verizon's standard, already easy menus.

The V750's finest feature is the speaker phone, it's Verizon's best. Located on the bottom of the handset, it's very loud, but never distorts voices. The earpiece is also of decent volume, though it does sound a little bit muddy. Transmissions, both through the handset microphone and the speaker phone, sound terrific, with almost no background noise coming through.

Reception is in the average range. The V750 uses the excellent Nuance VoiceSignal voice dialing suite and works with both 2.5 mm wired headsets and Bluetooth headsets. Ringtones are really loud, thanks to that delightful speaker phone. Vibrating alerts are short but sharp. And battery life was excellent, at over 5 hours of talk time. Tried out Verizon's new PTT system with two V750 phones, and it works well.

Setting up PTT takes a few seconds, but after that, my voice was sent pretty much instantaneously. You can also form ad hoc groups for conference calling with as many as 50 participants. Verizon's PTT system is available only on two phones right now, the V750 and the G'zOne Boulder. For it to be a serious threat to Nextel, the carrier will need to roll it out on more phones. The V750 hits Verizon's fastest data network, EV-DO Rev A, but doesn't make much use of it.

You can use Verizon's standard $5 a month mobile email app, or its IM client, but you'll be charged text message rates for IMs. There's also an anemic WAP only browser, and Verizon's walled garden of V Cast video clips, which play smoothly in full screen mode. But there's no true Web access, and although Verizon claims that the V750 can be used as a modem for a laptop, the drivers crashed two of our Windows Vista PCs (one with SP1, one without).