Motorola goes back to budget with the ZN200, W396 and W388

Features look pretty basic, with only GPRS for web surfing and a VGA camera

Motorola launches three new budget handsets after the limited success of the Z10

Published on Aug 20, 2008

Motorola has been pretty quiet on the mobile front since the Z10 proved to be a complete flop on the market, so it's no surprise the company has decided to hit the budget market with three new launches.

The ZN200 is an EDGE handset with a two megapixel camera (no autofocus), a 1.9-inch 176 x 220 pixel screen, stereo Bluetooth and a microSD card slot. The slider does look pretty good though, with three keys on the top for power, messaging and Bluetooth, and a sleek circular four-way navigation button below the screen.

The snappily named Motorola W396 is a tiny clamshell phone measuring just 95x45x17mm. This unfortunately means the screen is small too, and at only 128x160 pixels, it doesn't promise to be the clearest Motorola has ever produced. Features look pretty basic, with only GPRS for web surfing and a VGA camera, but at least phonecalls will sound crisp thanks to the integrated Crystaltalk technology.

The candybar shaped Motorola W388 is the cheapest of the three, but sounds the most feature-rich for music lovers. There's an FM radio with RDS, a USB port and a microSD slot (but sadly, no SDHC support). The screen is still low res, like on the ZN200 and W396, and like the W396, there's only GPRS.

The ZN200, W396 and W388 are expected to be available at the end of Q3 at what we can only expect to be very low prices.