Droid Razr Reviews
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The RAZR brand has a long and storied history, starting in the halcyon days of 2004. Back then it was a premium line — set apart from the crowd by its extremely thin profile and aluminum construction. Shortly after launching as an expensive status symbol, Motorola chopped the price and turned the V3 into one of the best selling handsets ever. In the years that followed there were countless revisions,colors and would-be successors that ultimately turned the once-hyped product line into a euphemism for obsolete technology.
Motorola has certainly had success since, particularly with the iconic Droid and Droid X, but alas, the Droid stamp belongs to Verizon. To once again make the name Motorola synonymous with cutting-edge tech, the company has returned to the well and resurrected the RAZR name. Has Moto managed to reclaim the magic and mystique of the V3, which had many a gadget hound coughing up some serious dough upon its initial release? Or is the Droid RAZR a successor in title only, more akin to the ill-fatedMOTORAZR maxx? Keep reading to find out.
Hardware
To say the Droid RAZR is thin doesn’t do it justice. At only 7.1mm thick it’s almost unbelievably svelte. Heck, the Galaxy S II, which impressed us with its sleek physique just a few months ago, measures a comparatively beefy 8.49mm. The RAZR does bulge out at the top to about 10.6mm around the 8 megapixel camera, but that’s hardly enough to make the handset cumbersome. Besides, the hump is the only place with enough room to house the headphone, HDMI and micro-USB jacks. Along the right side you’ll find all of the physical buttons. The textured power key sits roughly an inch above the rather flimsy volume rocker, which has almost no travel. The bottom of the handset is unadorned, but the left edge conceals the Micro SIM and microSD slots under a door that’s more than just a little tough to pry open. The RAZR ships with a 16GB card pre-installed, a nice complement to the 8GB of internal storage.
Handsets simply don’t get much more premium-feeling than the Droid RAZR.
The shell of the phone is a stunning mix of aluminum, Kevlar and Gorilla Glass. Handsets simply don’t get much more premium-feeling than the Droid RAZR. It may be extraordinarily light, but there’s just enough heft to reassure you it won’t shatter into a few dozen pieces on the first drop (though, we make no guarantees about the second or third). Good thing, too, since the synthetic fabric backplate is very slick, which makes it quite easy to get in and out of even your tightest jeans, but could make for a few accidental spills. Our one and only complaint is the sizable bezel. The fortified glass panel alone is the size of a Droid X, and that extra millimeter or so of width is just enough to make reaching across the screen with your thumb uncomfortable.
Towards the top of that slab of glass is a 1.3 megapixel camera for video chats, which stands out oddly thanks to the small square of transparent glass that interrupts the otherwise stark black bezel. Underneath the mirror-like sheet of Gorilla Glass is a 4.3-inch 960 x 540 qHD Super AMOLED Advanced panel. How exactly it differs from Super AMOLED Plus isn’t clear, but we do know that it does away with the controversial PenTile matrix. (Update: There seems to be some confusion as to whether or not the screen sports a PenTile matrix, we’re waiting on clarification from Motorola and will update when we hear back.) (Update 2: Despite initial reports to the contrary, it appears that the RAZR is, in fact, sporting a PenTile matrix display.) We didn’t have any major complaints about the display, but it didn’t quite live up to our expectations either. It was sharp, contrasty and bright enough to satisfy, but had a slight green hue that was very apparent at lower brightness settings. It also couldn’t match the brightness produced by the old-school TFT LCD on the Droid X or the IPS panel on the iPhone 4, though, its contrast levels were noticeably better.
The RAZR also has more accessories than you can shake a fine print-laden two-year contract at. We didn’t get any in time for our review, but the two main attractions are the Lapdock 500 and Lapdock 100. These laptop-style docking stations (14- and 10-inches, respectively) turn the RAZR into a portable (if underpowered) computer running Webtop.
Performance and battery life
The TI OMAP 4430 inside the Droid RAZR isn’t the most cutting-edge mobile processor on the market, but its dual 1.2GHz cores should be enough to satisfy even the most demanding smartphone nerds. Gingerbread 2.3.5 and the extremely flashy don’t-call-it-Blur hum along relatively smoothly. We encountered a few odd hiccups and stutters, primarily while placing and resizing widgets, but we’ll chalk that up to Moto’s liberal use of 3D animations. For the most part, though, transitions were smooth, navigation was speedy and apps were plenty responsive.
| Droid RAZR | Galaxy S II | Amaze 4G | |
| Quadrant | 2,798 | 3,200 | 2,514 |
| Linpack (single-thread) | 50 | 55 | 51 |
| Linpack (multi-thread) | 95.66 | 81 | 77 |
| Nenamark1 | 50.34 | 59.8 | 51.4 |
| Nenamark2 | 27.54 | 49.1 | 31.5 |
| Neocore | 59.98 | 59.8 | 59 |
| SunSpider 9.1 | 2,140 | 3,369 | 3,193 |
Benchmarks didn’t turn up many surprises. The RAZR notched an average of 2,798 on Quadrant, which puts it a bit behind the Galaxy S II, but ahead of the 1.5GHz Snapdragon-powered Amaze 4G. Moto’s sleek handset and the S II essentially traded victories, with the latest Droid beating Sammy’s flagship on the multi-threaded Linpack test (but not the single-threaded) and eking out a triumph in Neocore with 59.98 fps to 59.8 fps. But it lost the Nenamark 1 battle, pulling off just 50.34 fps, while the S II managed 59.8 fps. The one shock the phone had in store for us was blowing through SunSpider in just 2,140ms, putting it well ahead of most of the Android pack and even besting the iPhone 4S, which averaged 2,200ms. And that’s great news since you’ll want your browser to chew through code as fast as possible to take advantage of the RAZR’s blazing LTE radio. In our limited testing, we averaged just a hair shy of 19 Mbps down and 6.5 Mbps up.Motorola promises that the non-removable 1,780mAh battery will deliver up to 8.5 days of standby time and 12.5 hours of talk, but it survived just five hours and one minute in our battery rundown test. In our less scientific testing we managed a full day of moderate use. After an afternoon of browsing the web, syncing our data and placing a few phone calls, the RAZR was still going relatively strong, only dipping below the 15 percent mark as we approached midnight. Under light usage you may be able to squeeze two days out of it, but most likely you’ll need to plug it in every night before you go to bed. If you’re the type who really pushes their phone to the limits, we suggest you pack the charger — without a removable battery you’ll be stuck when the integrated power pack gives up the ghost.
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