Motorola RAZR hands on review

Can I say wow enough?  I’m probably being overly dramatic about it, but compared to the Captivate I’ve been carrying around this RAZR has been making it feel like my old Palm Pilot.

So, I’ve been using it for roughly a week now, and it’s performed very admirably.  I’ve made 2 videos:  one that’s a 10 minute quick overview and the other a short review of the docking station.

WARNING:

Now, before I start any of this, I have to let you know that I ran into a pretty severe problem on the outset.  It went into a series of just what I thought were random reboots.  After much digging around I figured out that the reboots only occurred at my house and when it was on WiFi then would go into sleep mode.  Not at my office’s wifi, or the coffee shop’s wifi, just mine.

I found some people that had similar issues on theirs in the Motorola forums:  https://supportforums.motorola.com/message/513644

From that I figured that there had to be some settings in the router that was causing the issue.  I don’t know specifically, but I went into my router, made one change and *presto* everything was tikity-boo.  What setting?

The first one I checked off was the ‘super G’ option… thought it innocuous enough.  That’s what seemed to work.  So, if you have the same issues – just look at your router settings, see if there’s some feature you might be able to turn off.  How it messes with the phone?  Don’t know.  I imagine there’s some bug fix coming.

On to the videos

For those of you who don’t want to listen to me [I personally hate the sound of my voice] here’s the run down:

Specifications

It’s got all the ‘standard connections’ with mini-HDMI, microUSB and 1/8″ stereo on the top.  Power and volume rocker on your right, and a slot for microSIM and microSD on the bottom left.

The back is a rubberized feel, which helps it feel ‘secure’ and non-slip in the hand.  No battery cover, which makes me a little anxious.

The processor is a dual core 1.2GHz processor, clunking away with 1GB RAM.  It provides you 16GB of storage (13 of which are usable).

Comes with OS 2.3.5, but you’ll see ICS on it soon enough.

Camera is 8MP, and the screen resolution is 540×960 on 4.3″ of Gorilla Glass

WHAT I LIKED

User Experience

The overall feel leaves you with a very honeycomb’ish feel to the launcher.  Here’s why

• 5 home screens and if you ‘swipe up’ you get that gallery like preview
• The app gallery swipes left to right, and comes with market link in the top right corner.  You also can uninstall very easily from the gallery.
• Your widgets (that are compatible) are size-able

It also includes a very ICS-like feature of having a data control feature.  It’s not 100% accurate (warns you as much), but gives you an idea of how much you’re using, without having to install a 3rd party app.  Additionally, individual notifications are cancellable (i.e. you can clear them without having to click to go into them, or clear all).  Great feature.

ULTRA SNAPPY

The screens and widgets are very fluid when you move them – widgets having that eye-candy like liquid feel to them.  I didn’t experience one lag on the phone while using it (since fixing the random reboot issue — see above).

Best email app yet

Seriously, that was a real treat to use for my exchange account for work.  I’ve tried several options, and some have this, some have that.  This had it all and without having to install separately.

The widget was scrollable and gave you good preview (and was size-able).  Very good UI and replying had text formatting options.  But the big seller for me was hierarchical view of folders.  I’ve asked the Motorola people who makes the app, because I’d consider buying just that for any phone I use from here on out.

High Resolution Screen

You stay at the same 4×4 icon screen size, but you get many more pixels.  As such photos look great.  What was weird is how much it saves you in some widgets.  My gTasks widget was able to fit more tasks on the view that I didn’t have to scroll.  And the G+ widget only took up 3 icons wide, instead of the normal 4.

Other features

I like the lock screen.  I like making the phone quick and simple to use.  The lock screen is a good example.  Swipe to unlock, mute or use camera.  All without having to install another app.

WHAT I COULD HAVE LIVED WITHOUT

Like most of the phones these days, they’re trying to ‘bake in’ the social aspect.  As such they have an app for conglomerating twitter, facebook, youtube, picasa, etc…  The issue is that it starts to embed itself in it’s own apps.  Like the Gallery app.  You click it and have an instant feed of all the pictures of your social feeds.  To see your own you have to click on a button.  I would have had it the other way around.

Entering text was nice.  They’ve given the phone Swype, which is awesome and the phone responds very well to it.  However, selecting text was not easy.  You get the big cursor indicator, which usually is a button to start selecting or copy/paste… but not so.  You have to LONG PRESS to bring up the option.  Not a big issue if this is your first Android phone, or you used something <2.2… but still.

The camera is really good (except in low light conditions).  Check out some samples:

[note the zoomed out photo of the christmas scene couldn’t upload – here it is http://min.us/lb0s9AziZ5t56n]

But the camera app doesn’t leave you with a lot of options to play around with.  Notably for me would be to have an ISO setting to adjust as I found it quite noisy in low light.

OTHER MISCELLANEA

MotoCast

One thing you hear Motorola really talk about is their Motocast feature.  This allows you to install an app on your computer (when you plug in your phone it’ll walk you through it) and then ‘send’ media to your phone and v.v. wirelessly.  Similar to AirSync or Kies Air etc…

Not a big selling point for me, as I’m a little more tech-savvy, however for somebody like my parents – that would be a killer feature.  One of the questions I get asked a lot is “how do I get X on to my phone?”  First I want to smack them as I have reviewed the cloud apps countlessly, but my typical answer is a little more tech-involved.  Motocast would really take a lot out of the ‘spooky tech’-ness of it.

Smart Actions

The other feature I thought was ingenious, but didn’t really get a chance to play with and test was the Smart Actions.  Based on ‘triggers’ you set up, the phone can then run a function.  Classic example would be “if the data rises over X, then turn off radio”, or “if battery gets below Y, then dim screen”, etc…

Something you have seen in other apps, but it’s so nice to have it built in that you don’t have to go around and test out other apps.  This works seemlessly with what’s already there.

So that’s my review.  There’s a few other things that I’ll probably remember tomorrow (like the weird bit if you look at it in near darkness the blacks look fuzzy and I saw consistent ‘streaks’ in areas (maybe something wrong with the LED in those areas).

But if you have any questions – I’d be happy to answer — just look me up on G+.

And, again, thanks to the good folks at Motorola, for not only producing a top grade phone, but letting me take it for a spin.