Completing the exterior of the phone are a volume rocker and the Direct Connect button on the left spine. There’s also a covered 2.5mm headset jack and a covered mini-USB port. The single speaker is on the bottom end of the phone; that’s a change from its usual location on the rear face of the handset. And in another change from previous Nextel models, the i335 has an internal antenna.

Features
The i335 skips the latest cell phone trends du jour–namely, 3G support, a megapixel camera, and a music player–in favor of the basics. The 600-contact phone book has room in each entry for seven phone numbers, an e-mail address, an IP address, a Direct Connect number and a Talkgroup number. Contacts can be organized further into a variety of groups for regular or push-to-talk calls, and you can pair them with one of 18 polyphonic ringtones. Other essentials include a vibrate mode, text and multimedia messaging, a calendar, a voice recorder, a speakerphone, a notepad, call timers, and call forwarding.

Fortunately, the i335 also offers Bluetooth and voice dialing. And it wouldn’t be a Nextel phone without the carrier’s Direct Connect walkie-talkie service. You’ll also find Group Connect, which lets you chat with up to 20 others via PTT at once, and Direct Talk, which gives you out-of-network walkie-talkie chat with another Direct Talk handset at a range of up to 6 miles.

You can personalize the i335 with a choice of wallpapers, themes, and alert sounds. If you don’t like what’s on the handset already, you can always download more options with the WAP 2.0 wireless Web browser. Alternatively, you get a fair choice of Java (J2ME) applications, including five game demos (Tower Bloxx, Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man, Midnight Pool, Tetris, and World Series of Poker) and TeleNav subscription-based navigation service that takes advantage of the i335′s GPS support.

Performance
We tested the Motorola i335 (iDEN 800) in San Francisco. Call quality was very good and up to usual iDEN standards. Voice clarity was excellent, and the signal did not suffer from interference. The volume level was also satisfactory; we had no problems hearing our friends when we were in noisy environments. On their end, callers said they could hear and understand us without any problems. They could tell we were using a cell phone, but that’s hardly unusual. Speakerphone calls were also admirable; we enjoyed more than enough volume and satisfying clarity. When we tried using the i335 with automated calling systems, we didn’t have any issues being understood.

The i335 has a rated battery life of 3.3 hours and 5.6 days. We were quite impressed with the tested talk time of around 5 hours, 10 minutes. According to FCC radiation tests, the Motorola i335 has a digital SAR rating of 1.53 watts per kilogram, which is rather high.