The RAZR brand has a long and storied history, starting inside the halcyon days of 2004. Back then it was a premium line — set aside from the group by its extremely thin profile and aluminum construction. Shortly after launching as a pricey status symbol, Motorola chopped the worth and turned the V3 into one of the most best selling handsets ever. Within the years that followed there have been countless revisions , colors and would-be successors that ultimately turned the once-hyped product line right into a euphemism for obsolete technology.
Motorola has certainly had success since, particularly with the long-lasting Droid and Droid X , but alas, the Droid stamp belongs to Verizon. To again make the name Motorola synonymous with cutting-edge tech, the corporate has returned to the well and resurrected the RAZR name. Has Moto managed to reclaim the magic and mystique of the V3, which had many a gadget hound coughing up some serious dough upon its initial release? Or is the Droid RAZR a successor in title only, more corresponding to the ill-fated 0 MOTORAZR maxx 0 ? Keep reading to determine.
Hardware
To claim the Droid RAZR is thin doesn’t do it justice. At only 7.1mm thick it’s almost unbelievably svelte. Heck, the 7 Galaxy S II 7 , which galvanized us with its sleek physique only some months ago, measures a relatively beefy 8.49mm. The RAZR does bulge out on the top to about 10.6mm round the 8 megapixel camera, but that’s hardly enough to make the handset cumbersome. Besides, the hump is the sole place with sufficient room to deal with the headphone, HDMI and micro-USB jacks. Along an appropriate side you will find all the physical buttons. The textured power key sits roughly an inch above the rather flimsy volume rocker, which has almost no travel. The ground of the handset is unadorned, however the left edge conceals the Micro SIM and microSD slots under a door that’s greater than somewhat tough to pry open. The RAZR ships with a 16GB card pre-installed, a pleasant compliment to the 8GB of internal storage.
The shell of the telephone is a surprising mixture of aluminum, Kevlar and Gorilla Glass. Handsets simply aren’t getting far more premium-feeling than the Droid RAZR. It could be extraordinarily light, but there’s simply enough heft to reassure you it won’t shatter right into a few dozen pieces at the first drop (though, we make no guarantees concerning the second or third). Great point, too, because the synthetic fabric backplate could be very slick, which makes it quite easy to get inside and out of even your tightest jeans, but can make for a couple of accidental spills. Our one and only complaint is the sizable bezel. The fortified glass panel alone is the dimensions of a Droid X, and that extra millimeter or so of width is barely enough to make reaching around the screen together with your thumb uncomfortable.
Towards the pinnacle of that slab of glass is a 1.3 megapixel camera for video chats, which sticks out oddly attributable to the small square of transparent glass that interrupts the otherwise stark black bezel. Underneath the mirror-like sheet of Gorilla Glass is a 4.3-inch 960 x 540 qHD Super AMOLED Advanced panel. How exactly it differs from Super AMOLED Plus isn’t clear, but we do know that it does away with the controversial 8 PenTile 8 matrix. We did not have any major complaints concerning the display, nevertheless it didn’t quite live as much as our expectations either. It was sharp, contrasty and bright enough to meet, but had a slight green hue that was very apparent at lower brightness settings. It also couldn’t match the brightness produced by the old-school TFT LCD at the Droid X or the IPS panel at the iPhone 4, though, its contrast levels were noticeably better.
The RAZR also has more 9 accessories 9 than which you could shake a superb print-laden two-year contract at. We didn’t get any in time for our review, however the two main attractions are the Laptopdock 500 and Lapdock 100. These laptop-style docking stations (14- and 10-inches, respectively) turn the RAZR right into a portable (if underpowered) computer running Webtop.
Performance and battery life
The TI OMAP 4430 within the Droid RAZR is not the most cutting-edge mobile processor available to buy, but its dual 1.2GHz cores must be enough to fulfill even one of the most demanding smartphone nerds. Gingerbread 2.3.5 and the extremely flashy don’t-call-it-Blur hum along relatively smoothly. We encountered just a few odd hiccups and stutters, primarily while placing and resizing widgets, but we’ll chalk that as much as Moto’s liberal use of 3D animations. For the foremost part, though, transitions were smooth, navigation was speedy and apps were plenty responsive.
| Droid RAZR | Galaxy S II | Amaze 4G | |
| Quadrant | 2,798 | 3,200 | 2,514 |
| Linpack (single-thread) | 50 | 55 | 51 |
| Linpack (multi-thread) | 95.66 | 81 | 77 |
| Nenamark1 | 50.34 | 59.8 | 51.4 |
| Nenamark2 | 27.54 | 49.1 | 31.5 |
| Neocore | 59.98 | 59.8 | 59 |
| SunSpider 9.1 | 2,140 | 3,369 | 3,193 |
Benchmarks didn’t occur many surprises. The RAZR notched a median of two,798 on Quadrant, which puts it a little behind the Galaxy S II, but prior to the 1.5GHz Snapdragon-powered 0 Amaze 4G 0 . Moto’s sleek handset and the S II essentially traded victories, with the most recent Droid beating Sammy’s flagship at the multi-threaded Linpack test (but not the one-threaded) and eking out a triumph in Neocore with 59.98 fps to 59.8 fps. However it lost the Nenamark 1 battle, pulling off just 50.34 fps, while the S II managed 59.8 fps. The single shock the telephone had in store for us was blowing through SunSpider in precisely 2,140ms, putting it well prior to a lot of the Android pack or even besting the iPhone 4S, which averaged 2,200ms. And that’s the reason great news since you will want your browser to chew through code as fast as possible to exploit the RAZR’s blazing LTE radio. In our limited testing, we averaged only a hair shy of nineteen Mbps down and six.5 Mbps up.
Motorola promises that the non-removable 1,780mAh battery will deliver as much as 8.5 days of standby time and 12.5 hours of talk, nevertheless it survived just five hours and one minute in our battery rundown test. In our less scientific testing we managed an entire day of moderate use. After a day of browsing the net, syncing our data and placing a couple of phone calls, the RAZR was still going relatively strong, only dipping below the 15 percent mark as we approached midnight. Under light usage you’ll be ready to squeeze two days out of it, but absolutely you need to plug it in every night before you visit bed. In case you are the sort who really pushes their phone to the boundaries, we advise you pack the charger — and not using a removable battery you can be stuck when the integrated power pack gives up the ghost.
Camera
The camera within the RAZR is amazingly such as that present in the 1 Bionic 1 . Both are 8 megapixel shooters able to capturing 1080p video with a single LED flash and so they produced very similar results. Pictures taken outdoors in broad daylight were decent, though the colours were a bit muted. While indoor shots under artificial lighting were acceptable, you can easily detect some noise within the images without the flash. The telephone actually takes surprisingly good macro shots, allowing us to stand up close and private with our keyboard and a flower (before the winter chill snuffs all of them out). It was quite easy to fireside off shots in quick succession owing to the very short shutter lag, however the autofocus couldn’t stay alongside of our taps and frequently had trouble zeroing in on its target.
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3 Video performance was certainly above average. The 30-second 1080p clip we captured was compressed all the way down to an incredibly miserly 59.3MB, however the video still looks relatively crisp. Color reproduction was good and it managed to capture a good amount of detail within the shadows. The camera has a picture stabilization feature that’s faraway from perfect, but certainly makes video captured by a few of our more shaky editors less nausea-inducing. The pair of mics is additionally switched between several different configurations, essentially the most useful of that’s “wind reduction” — for canceling out extraneous noise if you are narrating from behind the lens.
Software
4 Like most Android skins, Motorola’s tweaks are a love-it-or-leave-it affair. It is not quite as intrusive feeling as Sense, but when you are a fan of vanilla Gingerbread the customizations will leave you feeling cold. Sadly, where we found the Not-Blur shipping at the 8 Photon 4G 8 and X2 to be pleasantly restrained, the RAZR is more equivalent to the Bionic and loaded with gaudy animations that distract from — instead of add to — the Android experience. Linux users may spot a couple of similarities between Compiz and the wobbly widgets and zoomed out wall of home screens at the RAZR. Still, the OS is immediately recognizable as Android, and, outside of the overzealous use of superfluous eye-candy, it sticks to each of the Gingerbread paradigms you’re used to.
There are, in fact, some carrier and manufacturer apps loaded at the handset, a lot of which fall firmly inside the crapware category. But, several are welcome additions to the common-or-garden Android setup. Among the pre-installed apps can easily be uninstalled, like Blockbuster and Let’s Golf 2, but those specifically bearing the Verizon or Motorola brand cannot. Like lots of its Moto siblings, the RAZR comes loaded with QuickOffice, Citrix and MOTOPRINT, however the real standout, and new kid at the block, is sensible Actions. Just like Tasker, Smart Actions permits you to choose a collection of rules that trigger particular actions. Motorola is primarily pitching this to be able to extend battery life, but it’s loaded with possibilities. It is able to do anything from turn off the ringer and information syncing at a undeniable time of night, to send out a text message whenever you’re in a specific neighborhood (great for those family and friends members who complain you never visit).
Wrap-up
5 So has Motorola succeeded in reclaiming the prestige that after belonged to the RAZR brand? Unequivocally, yes — the handset is solely physically stunning. It’s thinner than almost any phone that you can buy and makes no sacrifices to realize its slim physique. It’s solidly constituted of premium materials like diamond-cut aluminum, Gorilla Glass and a sheet of super-slick Kevlar. Few phones obtainable can also be installed the identical category relating to build quality. It is not the foremost ergonomically sound handset available to buy, but when you cherish form over function (the very targets of a so-called fashion device), that’s a sacrifice worth making.
Do not get us wrong — the RAZR’s beauty is not just skin deep. The LTE radio, 1.2GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM make certain this sleek number is able to run with the large boys. It kept pace with, and on occasion clearly outclassed its high-end competition. Despite its deficiencies within the display department and underwhelming battery life, the RAZR looks to be a wonderfully viable alternative when considering the similarly-pricey 9 Rezound 9 and 0 Galaxy Nexus 0 , but we’ll must watch for our full reviews of these devices to assert surely. And do not forget: this one will only get well when ICS involves Moto’s slim slab of sexy.
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