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Motorola V3 Razr Review
Author: extremepc
Date Posted:06/03/2005 13:24.52
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Bottom Line:
The Motorola Razr phone brings great style and features to a cell phone, but is it worth the $500 pricetag?
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Features and Function
For the $500 price of this phone, I expected more then what the V3 Razr offered. While it does have the expected things, like Bluetooth and a camera, it would have been nice to see something unique, making it worth the extravagant price. I know other phones that actually have cheaper MSRP’s have things such as video recording, and expandable memory.
This leads to the next problem; the memory, just 5MB, is not upgradeable. Most Nokia phones, and even some Sony Ericssons offer expandability through memory card, while the V3 does not. While this isn’t a huge deal, it may annoy some who take lots of pictures on their phone, or have a lot of applications/games. A slot to insert a small SD card would be greatest appreciated in the next revision.
How about a run-through of the features it does have. Obviously, it has Bluetooth, which is becoming more and more common on cell phones these days. Bluetooth support seems to be pretty good, although don’t expect to use iSync with the phone on OS X, as Motorola phones do not support iSync. The phone can connect with OS X to upload/download photos and music, but thats the limit for Mac users. I have not been able to test Bluetooth support with a Windows system. I have also used the phone with an X-Micro headset, and that was flawless.
The camera is another nice feature to have, although don’t expect, like all other camera phones, to be able to print your photos, as this phone uses a VGA camera, which takes just a 640x480 image. The image quality is fine for the phone screen, but it looks less then favorable on a computer monitor.
The UI (user interface) of any cell phone should be considered a big priority, as it is what you use to interact with it. Having a weak user interface could drive you crazy when trying to do simple things, such as changing your ringtone. Unfortunately, this is one of those phones. While it is not as bad as that, the Motorola UI is considered the worst in the business by virtually everyone, and Motorola really needs to improve it.
Speaking of the UI, it only supports 64,000 colors. So even though the screen is capable of 262,000 colors, you’ll only see 64,000. Stupid, right?
The phone book on the phone, a primary feature for virtually all users, is also less then favorable. The main problem? The simple fact that you cannot associate more then one phone number with one contact, making your phone book list longer then needed. You need to add a new contact for each person, which is just so illogical, and Motorola needs to fix this. While it is nice to be able to see the picture of the person while scrolling through the phone book, this huge shortcoming really brings down the quality and usability of the phone book.
The phone has such features such as a datebook and calculator, which is nice to have. It also has an alarm clock, which I actually use for my morning “wake-up call.” Cingular loads up the phone with AIM, which works pretty nice, provided you can type quickly.
SMS is also pretty decent, as it offers all the features you’d expect from it. It does not use T9 for text entry, but iTAP, which is different, but definitely not a shortcoming. MMS is similar to SMS, as it has no noticeable problems.
The phone can playback videos (though I am unsure of which formats) and MP3’s, which is pretty cool. Of course, remember that you have just 5MB of memory, so just one song will probably take up most of your memory, leaving you little room for pictures and applications. You can also set your ringtone as an MP3, which is really cool, though I still haven’t decided on a song to use.
The phone also has a great sounding speakerphone, which really does come in handy.
I don’t really want to go too in-depth on the software on the phone, as that wasn’t my intention of this review. The bottom-line, regarding the user interface, is that Motorola has much to improve. Software-wise, Motorola is doing okay, as there are no serious shortcomings they need to worry about. New features would be nice, though.
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