Motorola Renegade V950 User Reviews

Ive had this phone 2 years now, and its great. Call quality is excellent. Speaker can be a bit hard to hear because its located on the bottom of the phone. It is very rugged and can be dropped, i have. The internet can be confusing to use and small to read. The GPS works GREAT. Its not flashy, but if you need a good calling phone with light data/internet use, it is worth it.

This is the biggest piece of crap!  They should recall these phones.  I know several people that have this same piece of crap and hate it.  All with the same issues, freezing, shutting down, horrible battery, calls dropping constantly and it isn't our location because I purchased a blackberry 8530 and that one doesn't drop and my husbands will drop a call standing right next to me.  We have traded it in a couple times with same issues.  Doesn't pay to have the insurance on it, when they send you the same piece of crap and now you have to pay the $50 deductible on it on top of the $7 a month for the insurance- put the $7 in the bank each month and save up for when you need to replace the piece of crap.   Sprint doesn't stand behind it either, even though the local stores agree that they are a horrible phone and don't know why they keep selling them.  Its hard to run a business talking to people on the phone when you are dropping them constantly.  Now if I could just get a reliable flip phone for my husband that would be great!

I have had three of these phones. It locks up, screens, both external and internal, go blank, so that you cannot even see what # you are typing in, and battery life is horrible. Sprint says it is not a warranty issue, i.e. damage, so they cannot help me. Why are companies not held responsible for selling defective merchandise? The display is an integral function of any phone! Very frustrated!!!

For the most part, this phone is "okay"....  I certainly wouldn't spend much money for it!  The battery life SUCKS on a good day.  It locks up, applications don't work and freeze up.  When you first get the phone, if it works....leave it alone.  I made the mistake of updating it, and now most of the stuff DOES NOT work.  And you can't go back to a prior version.

The phone seems great at first...has gps, tv, camera with flash, DC, the music buttons on the 2nd display, and just about everything else.

Then you realize that the battery cannot handle all these features, so in 4 hours you have to charge it. Then you find out that each text message is limited to 160 words. If you have something longer to say, you have to send the first and start a second.

Then it begins turning off randomly, then the screen goes black, blue, yellow and fuzzy.

I spent money on extra chargers for work, my bf's house, the car, and the extended battery. The extended battery made no notable difference, and in a month, I had to replace the chargers because they broke from over use.

Battery life sucks so I bought a extended battery which is a good improvement phone now lasts 2 days even using a lot of data. The main improvement they need to do is get back to using external antenna's!!!

It is nice to have a phone with SOOO many features. The problem is that you have to charge it constantly to be able to use the feature and not kill the phone by noon. I use the car charger and bought a second charger for work. I broke the chargers from using them so much...
I did get the extended battery which helps a little, but not that much.
Camera is great...flash is a great feature. Video is good too. Internet runs smoothly and tv is awesome. Music player works well and the buttons on the front make it easy to use.
I am not too familiar with the DC...I have only used it once.
The texting is hard because it only lets you write 160 words per text. You can only recieve that many as well, so long msgs get divided into several texts and they dont come in all at once or in order. So, it can get frustrating. Also, a keyboard would be nice.
It tells you what time you started the call when you hang up but if you go back later and want to see how long the call was, it doesnt say. I find that annoying too.

This phone is raw but the texting sucks the battery sucks and it freezes and shuts off all the time i hate it. i had the rumor before this and it was 23078025 times better. the phone sersiouly has issues. the chirp volume sucks. I bought this piece of crap when it first came out for hundreds of dollars and it was not even worth a fuckin cent fuck sprint fuck all you guys

I purchased this phone about 3 weeks ago due to T-Mobiles lack of customer service and failure to move with the times. Every network out there has 3G and so does T-Mobile but with only one phone that can bennifit from its features.
The Moto Renegade looks and works great, have found no problems thus far. Problem I am having is not with the phone but rather the carrier. I signed up for the simply everthing plan the offer and its great, but apparently not all phones are created equal like I though.
Apparantly when Sprint bought Nextel they needed to switch the Nextel towers and Phones to work with all sprint products they sell. My phones DC feature only works on certain towers in certain areas. Sprint tells me that this is the new SPRINT DIRECT CONNECT and that it is not available in my area but my phone says otherwise. Does anyone understand how this system works? I thought I had it figured out but apparently not.
Is it a Nextel DC or Sprint DC?

i have had my motorola v950 for some time i had to replace my initial unit one time due to recycling and or rebooting alot.  i had a problem with my battery at times as well but i was told that the initial battery came factory made. you have to run the battery down when you recieve the unit then charge it up.  when i did that i found that my battery can actual last more than 24 hours also if you are a heavy bluetooth user remember the pop up stating that using bluetooh will use a little more battery usage.  i work at least 10 or more hours a day.  when i utilized the v950 i was amazed at the amount of battery life i still had on the unit  for thoes who have one try these tricks: backlight make it 10 to 15 seconds, keypad make it 8 seconds. lower the standby mode time also.  for thoes who work at night try it also.  doing that in itself sufficently worked for me.  i still have my 950 and i must say it is a rugged phone.  folks dont throw away the unit or kick it to the curb just yet. cuz i found it to be a very great and reliable phone i love the speaker the call quality was good and very reliable.  oh by the way i forgot try also turning the network setting(roaming) to home or sprint only.  found out when you are auto mode it always makes the phone push to keep a good signal if you know you live in a good area with great sprint coverage then you won't need the auto mode use it when you know you are in a far area.  any questions just email me.  good luck folks

ok let me start off by saing i been with nextel since 2001, i wasnt happy with the merger i didnt like what sprint was doing at first with wanting to shut down the nextel network, i have a special place for nextel. but i also wa getting tired of there old phones, i had a i880 which was allright but had none of the features i really wanted. the only thing good about the iden network was that it was bulit from the ground up for ptt. but i dont need that anymore, so i wanted more coverage, better phone features. and ptt just to have incase i wanted to use it. the hybrids are garbage i mean come on no roaming??? great if your in a market for it, but if you move outside of one you either have no : "walk talk" or no pcs. sprint piggybacks off verizon for roaming. then this phone came along ha everything i could want, rugged, evdo, great display, sprint interface, roaming, sprint tv, plus ptt. and for all the guys and gals blaming sprint for the ptt problems maybe if you did a little research before you buy a phone you would know it does not work off of iden it is a cdma phone. they are just keeping the ptt name as nextel dc instead of q-chat, which is good. go on there website and look at the coverage for there dc and it will show you.i was well aware of the coverage area before i bought this phone. if you just need ptt stick with nextel they are the best for that i dont think any one is ever going to replace that and have it work like it did, but if your like me that wanted better coverage more features and a better phone, and ptt on the side, this is your phone!! hopefully a software update will fix the battery life, i found a quick fix thou, just turn off data when your not using it, lasts for 3 days with that off.

i bought this phone about 7weeks ago. at first my only complaint was how the text predictor worked. i had a sanyo phone before this one, and the text worked awesome. if you sent a certain text regularly ie. "snowboarding tomorrow?" or "on way home" etc. the phone would take the first 3 or so letters and auto phrase it out for you. not so with this phone. it also doesnt have a dictionary that you can place words that wouldnt normally be found in a dictionary, such as a friends name or a resturant name etc.
moving on, soon i found out that the alarm function only worked about 50% of the time. then, as i used it more, calls started not connecting and the phone would "lock up" like a computer that is virus infected. the only way to get it to respond after this was to turn it off and back on. NOT what i expect from  a "high end phone".
also as i have read on a few posts, and can attest to myself, the battery life sucks. it says this is a military shock spec phone, but i hope no military personel try to rely on it in the field, it will die on them and hopefully that is the only casualty on their mission.
i took it in to replace it today. it took about 45 min to an hour at a "flagship" sprint store and they just gave me a new one. which is ok, but any ringers you purchase go by by with the old phone, and make sure you get your original sd card if you have pics or vids you dont want to lose.

Sprint and nextel by far has great customer service in store where i am from.  That is why i left that piece of shit company verizon wireless.  Anywho, I traded in my old I930 towards this phone.  I love this phone, Everything works on it great.  This has to be the best cell phone I have ever had.

Needed a phone for work, something a little durable than my blackberry 8330 so i got this phone .  Works great no problem what so ever. Q-chat works great and has all the bells and whistle.

Two phones two weeks! FIRST PHONE would not provision waited over a week they replaced ..it with a new phone. Phone finaly provisioned. Not off to a good start! I also have problems roaming THIS PHONE IS TOTAL JUNK!!!!    

I picked up the phone last Wednesday, it is Tuesday of the following week and my direct connect still is not working. They say it is a problem with their system and keep promising me that it will be fixed. The first time they told me it would take no longer then 51 hours ( just 51 hours . . . lol) for them to correct their system.The phone did not work after the 51 hours. They said to bring it back to the store and I did. Now they said it would take 24 hours. Guess What? I still have no direct connect.
The phone is very cool looking and I have to say the navigation works real well but boy does it eat the battery up! Big time! If you want to conserve power by trying to turn the bluetooth on and off, thats a bit of a task, going through several steps. Bring your charger with you.
I'll be back with an update on my phone when my phone is finally up and working.

this phone has many handy features, BUT the ones you need as a nextel user DONT WORK REAL GOOD, its no secret that nextels signal frequencies carry better than any other cell carrier in tower stength, but this unit is too wimpy to get the signal out there (im basing this on the sprint network vs. nextel) i have tried 3 differnt models of the hybrid phones that were offered and send them all back and returned to strictley nextel units. When will sprint engineers get it right and design hybrid phones that use NEXTEL frequencies for talk and direct connect,and use sprint for web,text,and other features. If you cant get the basics to work right, what good are the accessories ?

First of all the only reason why I had this piece of crap phone was because my IC902 had been discontinued.  When I took it for service they told me that the phone was discontinued nationwide and that this was a comparable replacement/upgrade.  Reluctantly I agreed to trade in my IC902.  Now yet another problem.  Most of the stores were completely out of stock and I had to drive about 60-70 out of Cleveland, Ohio to find one.  I was told that they had great success with these phone and that they were selling like hot cakes. Blah, blah, blah.  After I got the phone on my way home I realized that the Nextel Direct Connect didn't work.  So I called customer service when I got home and sat on the phone with them for about 1 1/2 hours while they were trying to figure out why it didn't work.  Finally I was told that they were having an outage with the high speed side of the Sprint network and it was finally explained to me that the phone's direct connect is strictly based on the internet signal.  So basically if there is no strong internet signal, then my Direct Connect doesn't work.  Well I argued with the Sprint represantative on the phone, why the on the back of this paper weight it actually said that it had the Nextel Direct Connect.  The answer I got was that it is just like the Nextel Direct Connect but on the web.  I was told to call back in the morning and that the issues that I was having would be resolved once the account was fully established for this model phone.  Lies, lies and more lies.  The next morning the nightmare continued.  The phone not only did not work on direct connect but now it had problems dialing out a number.  It keept getting network failures.  Oh yeah I almost forgot to mention that I run my own business, that I highly depend on the service including the direct connnect to get in touch with people in the field and that it is Monday morning and I'm stuch with a piece of junk paper weight that the only thing it does at this point is suck the battery from a full charge down to nothing in about 2 hours and that when I got the phone the store had no car chargers to sell since the phone had only been out for a week.  But the story getts even better.  Later that day, I went back to the store after spending off and on about another 4 hours on the phone with Sprint's tech support.  I had the tech guy at the store physically look at it and see if anything could be done.  Now the truth comes out.  It has a hard time direct connecting to a power source phone such as the IC402, 502, 602, and 902 series as well the Iden Nextel phones.  The great news is that it does occasionally work with the new so called direct connect phones that Sprint has to offer.  I also found out that if the first number of the last four numbers of your current phone number starts with a zero, that this new phones can't direct connect in or out with any other phone.  Now at this time, I'm using a refirbished IC602 until I find a deal on a IC902 on ebay and buy it.  In conclusion here is the breakdown on this unit: the battery life sucks big time, the displays on the phone are great and you can customize them, the web when it wants to work is fast, the call quality is ok most of the time, the finally the direct connect sucks so bad that it has no comparison.  If you are a contractor or anyone who likes the Nextel TRUE Direct Connect, then this phone is definately not for you.  They took out the Direct Talk feature which enable users to communicate with the walkie talkie of the network and also talk to the standard walkie talkie units. If you plan on using the direct connect inside of buildings or in a car/truck going down the road, once again good luck.  Bottom line is that in my opinion they should have stuck with the Power Source phones and improve those than build this hunk of junk that is more like a kind's toy.  I'm always on job sites and in and out of buildings and for the 24 hours that I had this phone, I had to leave it mostly on charge and if I took it even into my house I would loose the high speed internet that it requires to run the NEW direct talk.  It is false advertising in my opinion to label it as Nextel Direct Connect.  If you need a phone that works and performs well than stay as far away from the new so called direct connect phones as possible.  THEY ARE GARGAGE.

Love this phone. No problems as of yet! Only thing I would change is the life span of the battery! Carry a charger with you if you're going to be gone all day!

This is a great phone but the Sprint network does not have the direct connect working in all locations.  After spending countless hours on the phone with Sprint, I was told that Sprint does not offer this kind of Direct Connect feature that this phone utilizes in my area...which is really stupid because I live in a large city.
The direct connect that this phone has is Qchat, and it does not work in my big city. It is not an Iden network that the old nextel phones use. And there is no telling if these 2 will really ever connect.  They are trying to get these all to connect together but it is not happening.  I'm very dissapointed that I was sold this phone without having any knowledgable staff tell me that this feature would not work.  When it will?...hmmm, I was only told 'soon". Could be years, months or never! As was the case with the last phone I got when they told me I could push to talk to my husband's nextel 3 years ago.  Never happened.
Besides the bad sides of Sprint as a carrier and tooting it's horn that it will connect to nextel before they even have the system in place, the phone itself is very nice. Ringers are loud if you want them to be.  The larger screen on the outside & inside is super.  I can finally read the time & incoming calls without putting on my glasses!  Very easy navigating different areas of the phone.  I haven't tested the GPS navigation part in my car yet, but it was easy to put in an address by voice and have it give you directions. Seems as if it will work. Really nice to quickly look up movies, restaurants or gas stations when traveling-nice maps. Nice weather radar also.  The TV part is kind of fun to if you find yourself stuck at a airport or something.  But you have to subscribe to the everything package to get these features, which isn't to unreasonable compared to others.  I'm not a texter or an e-mailer on a phone, so I can't comment on that.  Has a camera/video that is so-so as is such with most phones.  Wish that you could put your own music on this without having to buy it, but I hear there are ways of getting around that  for the more savey music buffs out there.  Voice calls are good, no static or echoes even on speaker.  Web connects acceptably quick if you are into that for browsing.  Battery life sucks. I haven't looked into getting a more powerful battery yet.
The phone is really nice --- BUT be sure to call Sprint MANY TIMES as alot of the Reps do not know a thing about this phone to see if you can direct connect.  You will get many different answers. YES NO YES NO!!!!  I bought 2 of these phones & they won't even connect between themselves in my area, so I have no idea that if they ever do get the Qchat to work here, that they really will ever be able to connect to an Nextel on the Iden network.  False advertising once again. So buyer beware if you want that feature.
Others in different areas may have better luck, but still....I feel a bit duped.  I think that they put this on the market before it is set up and tested in all markets, just to keep up with their competitors. 
I wonder if that is why they offer it at a semi-low price..kind of feel as if they want folks to buy so they can lab test this new Qchat integration at our expense.

Just got the phone and went to a Sprint store to get all my contacts moved over from the I880. No problems and the speakers is louder then most other phones even at the lowest levels. No problems with direct connect/Qchat if you tell sprint to keep the dc number and not set it as a phone number. Will need a car charger though...Overall a good phone.

I have only had this phone a week, but LOVE it.  Great sound quality, great screens, awesome feel.  Qchat works very well.  Im still learnign my way around, but so far so good.  My only complaint is the battery life is small, I only get a day out of a charge, and sometimes its even a hair less than a full day, I just need to buy a car charger.

I am going to compare this to the Sanyo Pro-700 as that is the phone that I just had with all kinds of issues. Everyone was complaining that they could not hear me on the Sanyo, the V950 has teriffic call quality and reception. The volume of the earpeice and speaker is also much louder and distortion free. The screen is bigger on the main display which helps with browsing the web. The Qchat (Direct Connect) works well on this phone. The rubber housing is a nice touch and it is a little heavy, but just heavy enough to feel very solid in your hands. I realize I have only had this since 9/2/08 but I am one to put it through the tests. I only get one day out of a full charge on the battery, but I am using it for email, text, AIM, and as a phone.