Initially I fully intended to wait for the Galaxy Nexus; as I use the Razr I'm constantly comparing it to what I hear about the Nexus. I did like the Razr very much and when Amazon offered the phone at one penny for new activations (we switched to Verizon from Sprint) I went ahead. AmazonWireless has the best deals on smart phones I've found, and I have 30 days to exchange the phone for another model if I'm not happy with it so I had nothing to lose by 'test-driving' the Razr.
Now on to the phone!
From the packaging to the power cable to the Razr hardware itself, everything feels sleek and durable. I'm not going to pretend I'm an engineer, but the impression is that this device is constructed of the highest quality materials and it gives me a feeling that I'll never have to worry about hardware problems. As light as it is, the Razr still feels tough as nails.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I think this phone is 'sexy' - if that's possible for a bit of plastic, glass, and metal. I love the design. It is a bit wide, and I find that I've adjusted the way I hold the phone slightly to compensate. I'm a male with medium to smaller hands and my wife is tiny and I've heard no complaints from her, but if you're considering this phone you might want to test drive it in the store before ordering.
In order to make the phone as thin as it is Motorola made the phone wider and longer than the screen relative to most phones we're seeing now where the bezel is very close to the screen edge. I don't find this to be an issue and the appearance is quite 'normal' looking. The phone does have the four Android buttons (capacitive touch) on the bottom for Menu, Home, Back, and Search. This has been the standard for all Android phones but will go the way of the Dodo with Ice Cream Sandwich (Android OS 4.0), where these options are part of the OS. Personally, I like having the static buttons on the bottom of the phone.
Additionally, the phone is thicker just at the top, where Motorola chose to put the headphone jack, rear camera and the micro-usb and hdmi ports. This actually helps me to pull the phone out of my pocket so I like it. The power button and volume rocker are on the right side as you look down at the face of the phone, and there is a flip door on the left for the sim and microsd cards.
In case you aren't familiar with them, here are a list of the more important specs (credit to hexus.net) on the phone:
The specsHaving the charger port at the top of the phone makes it a bit inconvenient to use the phone for calls while charging, but otherwise the location of the ports, cards and buttons makes sense. There's been some deal made about the battery not being removable on this phone by the end user - it must be replaced by Verizon. Again, I don't have an issue with this as I don't carry a spare battery, and as I'll describe in more detail below I've configured this phone to last over a day on a charge with normal use. If a hard reset is necessary, this can be done by holding the power button and volume down at the same time.
• 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Advanced qHD touchscreen display
• scratch-resistant corning Gorilla Glass
• 7.1mm profile – the world’s thinnest smartphone
• precision machined stainless steel core
• laminated construction for enhanced rigidity
• Kevlar back coating
• Motorola Splash Guard nanotechnology (water-proof capabilities)v • Dual-core 1.2GHz processor
• 1GB of RAM
• 8-megapixel camera with 1,080p HD Video recording support
• Battery: 12.5 hours talk time, 8.9 hours of video playback
• webtop technology
• Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread
• Moto Cast – personal cloud support
• Enterprise features: Citix Receiver, GoToMeeting, Videoconference with HD webcam
• Business Ready: Corporate email access, Corporate calendar and addresses, Microsoft Office documents support
• Security capabilities: FIPS 140-2 government-grade data encryption, remote wipe of device and SD card
• Accessories: Elite Silver BT Headset, Universal Travel Charger, P893 Portable Power Pack, 10.1-inch Lapdock 100, 14.1-inch Lapdock 500 Pro, Vehicle Navigation Dock, HD Station and HD Dock, Wireless Keyboard with Trackpad Mouse
• Moto ACTV compatibility
• 4G LTE via Verizon
The RAZR will support 4G LTE via Verizon and come with 16GB onboard memory and 16GB memory card bundled with it.
I was surprised to find that only 3 GB of the onboard memory is available for applications. It's a lot more than I had on my previous phone, the HTC Evo 4g, but I expected that the entire 16GB of onboard memory would be available - aside from the portion needed to run the Android OS, of course. It is possible to move portions of many applications to the sd card to save space but this is cumbersome and I've had it cause problems with widgets for applications - they don't seem to work when the application is moved to the sd card.
Eventually I stopped admiring my phone and actually turned it on and started using it. The phone is fully charged rapidly, the first time it took 3 hours and since then I think it's been under 2 hours from 10% to fully charged. When powering on the device for the first time I was walked through the setup wizard which I was familiar with having come from another android phone. My previous phone used HTC's Sense interface and the Razr has the Motorola (don't call me Blur) interface. I honestly don't know what they're calling it now, so I'll just call it the MotoUI.
Generally speaking, I don't like the MotoUI as much as Sense. It's not bad, it just doesn't feel quite as intuitive. The Sense interface is bright and attractive, well known for the oversized clock and weather widget on the home screen. The Razr has nothing like this and thought it's not a functional issue, I miss it.
Instead, the Razr's interface keeps with the 'Droid' theme - it's a bit dark and robotic. Even the default text notification sound is a robotic voice saying 'droid.' Frankly I think going this direction limits the market for this phone. Though I know two women who own it, I certainly don't think the theme is one that would attract female customers. Then again, I've never known much about women. That's another blog though.
What Motorola has done well is provide some platforms to bring together various social media and text applications. There is a messaging inbox that has links to both individual text and chat applications and also a universal inbox with them all aggregated into one feed. There is a similar aggregation for social media applications.
Another welcome application from Motorola is the Smart Actions they've included. This fantastic app provides an amazingly powerful and flexible means to automatically manage your phone. You make use of triggers like time and location to launch apps, turn off your ringer, disable the wifi radio, and more. The options are nearly endless and it works great. Not only is Smart Actions functional, it also can increase the battery life significantly by intelligently turning off features when you don't need them - i.e. background data, wifi, and gps can be disabled overnight, then set to turn on at a certain time OR when the phone is moved. Pretty slick stuff.
Speaking of battery life - at first I would say the battery life was OK. Better than my old phone, but I wasn't getting a full day out of a charge like I had hoped and expected. I found that the Android OS was using up the greatest percentage of my battery, whereas my friend with a Bionic had that as the third greatest drain behind the display and sleep mode. He was getting a solid day out of his battery, so I did a little investigating to see if I could figure out what might be draining mine.
What I found really surprised me. Fortunately, some enterprising person with a great deal more patience and technical know-how then I have did extensive research on the subject for all of us. I recommend anyone with an android phone read the entire post here, but the takeaway is that widgets can really kill the battery life. I've removed all of mine. I can certainly add them back one at a time until one of them starts to drain the battery and then I'll know who the culprit is, but it just isn't that important to me. Android is great about notifications and otherwise I use shortcuts to apps which works fine for me. So now I have very frequent data polling, push email, live wallpaper, and I can use my phone regularly and get over 24 hours on a charge. I think with heavy use it will still get me through a work day, unless I'm using the phone as a mobile hotspot of course. Bottom line - I'm very happy with the battery life as far as the hardware is concerned, Android has some work left to do from an OS perspective (or maybe it's the fault of the widget developers, hard for me to say).
The Razr touchscreen is a dream come true. Everything with this phone is just instantaneous - sometimes it feels like the Droid is a step ahead of me. The sensitivity is perfect, and I just love it. Apps appear instantly. I can individually clear items from the notification window-shade. I'm probably gushing, because it's just truly fantastic.
I have five home screens to customize, and apps or widgets (if you still care about those after reading above) can be added from the Menu button or a long press on the screen or from a long press on the app in the Apps list. The latter is now one page long and scrolls page by page to the right. All very smart and good improvements. There are four software buttons that remain static on each home page and these too are customizable - again very smart. One of the things I love about Android is the ability to make it fit my needs.
One problem I've had is with the Calender. I have one google account for personal use and one for work. The calendar synced fine for my personal account but none of my existing calendar entries appeared for my work account. New entries appear fine, and I didn't have enough old ones that it was a big problem for me, so I didn't spend any time trying to fix this, but it could really be a problem for some people if they had the same bug.
Additionally, I wasn't able to login to the My Verizon app to check my data usage, etc. but after 24 hours that started working.
Without a doubt, the biggest unsolved problem has to do with the mobile hotspot feature. One of my laptops can connect to the phone's hotspot but doesn't get an ip address. My other laptop connects and gets an ip address but can't go to any https site. There are many users with this issue and it's been reported and discussed on the Motorola forums. I don't know if the problem is Verizon's or Motorola's, but this needs to be fixed pronto, especially with what they charge for this feature (an additional $20 a month with 2GB extra data).
As with almost every phone on every carrier, Verizon has felt it necessary to put maybe half a dozen apps on the phone that I don't use, don't want, and cannot uninstall. They are not intrusive but it drives me nuts - when will carriers and computer manufacturers stop doing this?
All in all, I love this phone. It's sleek, wicked fast, has a nice looking screen (I don't understand the complaints I've read, it looks great to me), plenty of memory and for the most part it works great. I expect some issues with any new phone, and the Droid Razr has exceeded my expectations in this area. Neither my wife nor my friend have had any issues with theirs either. Oh, and since it's a phone, I guess I should mention that call quality is fine. Not great, but not bad. Since it's Verizon I haven't had an issue connecting or hearing anyone, and the entire time I've had the phone it's had a 4G signal (I live in Atlanta).
The hype surrounding the Galaxy Nexus is tempting, but I believe I'll stick with the Razr. I feel in a hardware comparison it beats the Nexus, and it should have Android's Ice Cream Sandwich update first quarter next year according to Motorola. I'm glad I gave this phone a try as I'm quite happy with it.
Bonus review!
I bought the OtterBox Commuter Series case for the phone and I love it. It is absolutely top quality. I got it for just over $20 on amazon.com, and it came with a screen protector which went on great and has an excellent feel to it. I've never put a screen protector on before and this one went on with ease, no bubbles and perfectly positioned. My finger glides over it very nicely. I previously had a Zagg Invisible Shield which cost half as much as the case and was far too tacky for my taste.
The case itself is a silicone inner layer protected by a harder poly-carbonate shell. I especially like that this shell is not grippy like silicone, so the phone slips in and out of my pocket with ease. I highly recommend this case if you have a Razr.
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