About a week and a half ago, I upgraded my wireless phone to a Motorola T720i. It’s one of those flashy color screen camera phones. I’m not sure about the practical utility of a camera on a cell phone, but I’m probably not the target market for that feature. Nevertheless, the T720i has turned out to be a pretty good phone for me.

My previous phone was a Nokia 8290. I loved the 8290’s tiny size and it worked well for me for a little over two years. But the battery was starting to go bad and I decided that I might as well just get a new phone instead of buying a new battery for the old one. Somewhat wasteful, perhaps, but since T-Mobile uses GSM I can swap my SIM card around between phones as much as I want. The 8290, even with its weak battery, is an ok backup phone.

The T720i isn’t quite as small as the 8290, but it’s close. If you exclude the antenna, it’s shorter. With the antenna, it’s only very slightly taller. It’s noticably thicker and wider, and according to my kitchen scale (I don’t trust the manufacturer’s weight specs), it’s about 1 1/8 ounce heavier. Not a big deal — it’s still small and light. The color screen isn’t stunning, but it’s not bad. It’s more than adequate for everything I’ve wanted to do so far (which, admittedly, almost never requires color at all). The interface is a lot better than that on other Motorola phones I’ve had, and having WAP is a nice plus.

My only real complaint would be that the ringer isn’t as loud as I’d like. The polyphonic ringtones sound nice. It’s very cool to be able to find or create MIDI files and use them as a ringer. But I find it pretty hard to hear if there’s any noise around. Not a big deal for me; I generally keep my phones on vibrate anyway.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with this phone. It’s not perfect, but it meets my needs and the price was reasonable. I like some of the high end phones, but I have a very hard time justifying more than about $200 for a device like this.