We might not like the way Motorola is naming its phones here at TrustedReviews, or the way it’s been caught up in some kind of design rut lately with its wannabe, flat-keyboard, size-zero look seems.
But the company doesn’t seem to be showing much sign of either of those conventions being retired just yet, and here we are on the cards with two new RAZR phones. One of them is the MOTORAZR Maxx, the other is the current test cell phone, the MOTORAZR V3xx.
We’ve never reviewed a RAZR incarnation before – unless you count Riyad’s glimpse of one in passing as he reviewed BT Fusion, so hold on to your hat while I take the plunge.
Like many Motorola phones, the MOTORAZR V3xx isn’t at the top of the tech specs – except for one thing. It supports HSDPA with speeds up to 3.6 Mbit/s. It’s the first handset in 3 to support HSDPA at this speed and if you buy it you’ll be well ahead of the curve. However, you might as well spend your money on a chocolate teapot. After checking with the marketing folks at Three, I was told that this HSDPA speed is “hopefully” coming out in the first half of this year, but there are no firm commitments there. Of course, using the old 3G standard, the phone will keep roaring when there is a signal.
In terms of design, the MOTORAZR V3xx will not surprise anyone familiar with the RAZR concept. This is a flip phone that’s slightly taller (102.9mm) and wider (53mm) in closed mode than seems reasonable. It just feels a bit big to hold comfortably. It’s not exactly thin at 14.9mm and at 107g it surpasses the magical 100g barrier.
For an extremely thin alternative, take a look at Samsung’s SGH-D830 (just don’t try to open it with one hand – ed.).
Like many other Motorola phones, the Flip doesn’t extend the full height of the bezel – there’s a 15mm plus full handset-thick lip along the bottom front edge. The front bezel and rear case are mostly black with some flashes of silver around the edges and where the clapper meets the lip.
In the front case sits a small CSTN screen with 65,000 colors, 19 mm wide and 16 mm high, displaying 96 x 80 pixels. It looks a little lost in the vastness of the outer shell, and both it and its large frame picked up more fingerprints than a US immigration officer. The rest of the front outer case is mostly glossy and has managed without trying to look dirty.
Open and we move from black with a silver border to silver with a black border. This is where the two plus points of the large clamshells come to the fore: both the main screen and the number pad are relatively large.
The main screen is a TFT and manages 262,000 colors in 320 x 240 pixels and fits in an area I measured at 55mm corner to corner, 34mm wide and 45mm high. It’s clear, sharp and bright – impressive and with the best screens I’ve seen on a handset.
I have to admit that I never really like the flat RAZR number pad, no matter how many times I see and use it. I like the tactile feel of real buttons. Still, I have to say in its favor that significant advances have been made since Motorola’s earliest flat number pads.
The buttons, in particular, are all large, they’re separated by slightly raised lines, and the numbers and other elements glow blue in dim conditions (of course it has to be blue), making them relatively easy to use.
As an HSDPA handset, the MOTORAZR V3xx is capable of video calling and for this purpose a small VGA camera is embedded in the hinge area between the screen and the keyboard. While the super-fast HSDPA is something of a tie, as I’ve mentioned, the MOTORAZR V3xx is a shade behind the times in every other respect.
The main camera has a resolution of up to 1.3 megapixels, which is far below today’s megapixel average. Its lens sits on the front flap so it faces outward when you open the phone, while when you close the phone it faces you. You can use the front screen to snap shots of yourself, but without a side button to activate the camera, you’ll have to launch it with the flip open. At the very least, this is a one-step process, as the camera software responds to a soft menu button.
The lens didn’t like being too close to its subject, and even slight movement of the handset during recording resulted in blurry images. Photographing everything that moved was a real challenge. It took many, many tries to get the test shot of the cat, and even then his face is a little blurry – people with shaky hands should take note.
There is a music player on board that can handle the file formats MP3, AAC and WMA. It produced reasonable sound quality from the device speaker and really impressive music quality through a headset. There’s 50MB of built-in memory and a microSD card slot under the battery to add more song storage.
As far as sound quality goes, I could easily listen to music with this phone, but as a portable music player, there are two issues: the MOTORAZR V3xx has a mini-USB headphone jack, meaning it’s difficult to use your own wired headphones, and the battery life is appalling. I played just over four hours of continuous music from a microSD card. Four hours 11 minutes to be exact. That’s pretty bad, and it might prove difficult to get through a daily commute and lunch break on a single charge.
Other applications include a web browser (the excellent Opera browser), calendar, calculator, alarm clock, voice recorder, email, MMS, SMS and IM support.
“‘Verdict”‘
The MOTORAZR V3xx feels a bit like “more of the same” and its only saving grace from that moniker is 3.6Mbps HSDPA support. However, I’m not sure if that will be enough to earn a place in the collection of the best handsets. The camera and battery life in particular are serious disappointments.
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We put every cell phone we test through its paces. We use industry standard tests to properly compare features and we use the phone as our main device during the review period. We will always tell you what we find and we never accept money to rate a product.
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Used as our main phone during the period
Verified against respected industry benchmarks and real-world tests
Always has a SIM card installed
Tested with phone calls, games and popular apps
points in detail
Ease of use 7
value 7
functions 7