T-Mobile's recycled phone is made of plastic bottles and low end tech. Is the environment worth the sacrifice? Find out in our Motorola W233 Renew review.
Review summary of the Motorola W233 Renew:
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 We have a strong appreciation for the Motorola W233 Renew. It's a phone that answers a lot of solemn needs. The environmental standards Motorola has set with this phone are an impressive first start. The phone is carbon neutral, through the use of recycled materials, improved manufacturing techniques and the purchase of carbon credits to offset production. It comes in a simple cardboard box. But what impressed us most of all was the phone's high sound quality during calls, coupled with superb battery life. We're asked all the time to recommend a simple phone that just makes good calls, and there are a lot of reasons to recommend the Moto W233 Renew. Unfortunately, it does almost nothing else well. Not Web browsing, not music playing, and it doesn't even have a camera, or e-mail, or IM support. It's the first phone we've seen in ages that doesn't even have Bluetooth. Still, it makes good calls, it's a friend to the environment, and it only costs $10 at launch with a contract. The big bad smartphones have a lot to learn from this simple device. Release: February 2009. Price: $10.
Pros: Made of recycled plastic. Carbon neutral production. Great call quality and battery life.
Cons: Lacks most features we expect, including Bluetooth. Available Web and multimedia features are very low end, or failed to work properly.
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Full Motorola W233 Renew Review:
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The Motorola W233 Renew got a lot of attention when it was released because of its environmentally friendly design and production. The phone is being touted as the most green phone on the market (in more ways than one, perhaps). The plastic shell uses recycled plastic bottles in its construction. To offset emissions from the production of this phone, Motorola has purchased carbon credits, making this the first carbon neutral phone on the market. But besides the environmental concerns, the Motorola W233 Renew is also a phone that is easy to recommend.
As phone reviewers, we get asked all the time to make phone recommendations for friends and family. Perhaps its not surprising, but one of the most frequent requests we get is for a phone that simply makes calls that sound good. While we've fielded requests for phones that can upload DVD-quality video to YouTube, or phones that might get dropped from a speeding motorcycle, many of our friends are looking for a simple phone that is also reliable for calling.
That's why they call it a cell phone, after all
The Motorola W233 Renew may not be the most feature-rich phone. In fact, it does almost everything poorly. Everything, that is, except making calls. Despite the fact that this is a decidedly low-end, inexpensive phone, Motorola has blessed the phone with the manufacturer's Crystal Talk technology. Crystal Talk is basically a noise reduction tech that helps filter out background noise. In practice, the feature really did work well. You might not notice it much during an average cell phone call, but when you're driving down the highway with your windows rolled down, or standing next to a moving subway, you'll appreciate Crystal Talk even more. Callers never had a problem hearing us.
The phone didn't get great reception, but even when signal dipped to a single bar of T-Mobile service, the Motorola W233 Renew had no trouble connecting calls. Even better, though, was the battery life. The battery on the Moto Renew is outstanding. In our tests, we managed to eke more than 10 hours of talk time out of the phone, which is even more than the impressive 9 hours that Motorola promises. Just as impressive, when we first got our review unit we charged it completely, then let it sit around . . . for a month. When we got around to picking it up, the phone was still in standby, and still had enough juice left to make a couple calls. Very impressive.
Besides good calling, the Motorola W233 also had a few nice features tucked inside. The speakerphone was adequately loud, though not abusively so. Conference calling was very easy, so serious party line chatters should take note. If you're looking for a simple phone that makes great calls, you can stop reading here. The Motorola W233 Renew costs only $10 with a T-Mobile contract agreement. It's environmentally friendly, it looks cool, and it will give you street cred (forest cred?) in more ways than one.
The stuff we really miss
We can forgive a lot in a phone like the Motorola W233 Renew, since it's such a competent, simple phone. But there are a few things that we miss too much. We tend to use our phones when driving, and the Renew is an unfriendly phone for drivers. The keys were a little small. There is no voice dialing option. Worst of all, there is no Bluetooth, so handsfree wireless connections are out of the question. This is the first phone we've seen in a while without Bluetooth, and we rely on our BlueAnt Supertooth speakerphone for all of our calls on the go.
There are also a few features on the Motorola W233 Renew that should work much better than they actually do. Text messaging was okay, though the interface for sending messages was pretty ugly, with blocky text and hardly enough room on screen. The phone has picture messaging, but you have to jump through hoops to send a picture, since the phone has no camera. We would have liked a camera on this phone, but for the price and the environmental concerns, we can't imagine Motorola packing any sort of quality lens into this device.
The Renew also brags about its musical abilities, with an "MP3" badge up top and a musical note button that jumps you into the music player. Unfortunately, the music player was pretty lousy. It couldn't find our MP3 tracks on the microSD card we loaded, and there was no way to update the phone's musical library. It's too bad, because a solid media app might have made this phone the most environmentally friendly music player on the market.
The stuff we can live without
The Motorola W233 Renew tries its hand at Web browsing, but with its super-slow GPRS networking and tiny, 1.6-inch, 128 by 128 pixel screen, why bother? The most basic information is available in a pinch from T-Mobile's own tzones front page, and we even got some mobile Web pages to load, but Web sites looked ugly on this screen, even in their mobile form.
As long as we're keeping things simple, we can probably live without IM and e-mail on this phone, as well. If you're interested in this inexpensive, environmentally friendly phone, you're probably not interested in shelling out for a data plan, so its best to avoid services that download a ton of data over a long period, like always-on instant messaging.
We can also live without the larger box and heavy user manuals of a more complicated cell phone. The Motorola W233 Renew comes packed in a recycled paper box that is smaller than your average phone box. The manual is printed with soy-based ink. This doesn't need to be a feature exclusive to this phone. Hopefully, just as the top-notch features on high-end multimedia smartphones trickle down into the less expensive carrier phones, so too will the environmentally friendly practices that Motorola is pioneering with the Motorola W233 Renew seep upward into the top of the line. After all, does a new Motorola RAZR really need such thick user guide?
Price and availability
The Motorola W233 Renew is available now from T-Mobile for $10 with a service agreement.
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