The phone has
many of the requisite applications and access to the 300,000 applications in
the Android Market. The free MotoCast application lets users stream music,
pictures and documents from their computers through the Razr, adding some nice
media portability. Motorola has also added what it calls a Smart Actions application,
which is a personal phone management assistant of sorts that boosts battery
life and automates utilities.
No, not like
Apple's Siri virtual assistant. What
Smart Actions
does is let users create rules that trigger the phone to perform certain
actions, such as silencing itself, or turning off power-draining features to
preserve the battery based on where a user is with their Razr. Smart
Actions will automatically launch news in a widget on the Razr in the morning
and open Google Maps to optimize it for use in the user's car.
The phone,
which has 16GB of internal memory, expandable to 32GB with a microSD card, also
connects to
Motorola's docking stations, allowing users to port the Razr's content to a larger
display.
To my mind,
the only thing that could make this aesthetically-pleasing, speedy handset
better than it is would be if it were loaded with the new Android 4.0 "Ice
Cream Sandwich" platform, with holographic icons and soft navigation
buttons, among other perks. Alas, we must wait until next year for that on the
Razr.
Drawbacks
Motorola
packed this puppy with a 1,780-mAH battery, which I assumed would provide a
full day's use. It did, albeit for email, Web browsing, phone calls and
texting.
What OEMs
won't tell you-and what is incumbent on me to tell you-is that whether you're
using 3G or 4G LTE networks, the phone's battery goes kaput fast when you
stream video or play a lot of games-anything that involves a lot of data.
I tested the
Razr's power source by playing TV episodes on mute as I worked on other
stories. On a full charge, the Razr made it through just two-and-a-half
X-Files episodes.
X-Files runs about 45 minutes per episode, which means I wore down
the battery in less than two hours. The battery got hot, but not
fry-an-egg-on-it hot the way the HTC Evo and other phones before the Razr
cooked.
So if you're
going to be out and about and watching Netflix or a lot of YouTube, make sure
you bring your Razr's charger. Don't think about swapping out the battery
either; it's enclosed and non-swappable, which on the plus side lends itself
well to the thinness and lightweight design of the Razr.
Also, at $299.99,
the Razr is as pricey as a phone on contract gets here in the U.S. That will
ward off some who perhaps want to buy
Verizon's Samsung Stratosphere 4G LTE QWERTY
slider for half the price,
or even a shiny new Apple iPhone 4S for $199.
Of course, if
you place a premium on speed and cutting-edge design without concern for the
hardware cost, you can't go wrong with the Razr. It's at the top of its class
from Motorola, and the Android OEM was at the top of its game for this
smartphone.
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