Motorola Droid RAZR Review - A Better Clad Bionic
by Brian Klug on December 16, 2011 2:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Droid
- LTE
- 4G
- Motorola
- Android
- Mobile
- Droid RAZR
- motorola droid RAZR
Final Thoughts
The RAZR is honestly some of the best Android hardware I’ve seen in a long time. It’s incredibly thin, has awesome build quality and an excellent in-hand feel to boot. I find it interesting that we now have Apple, Nokia (Lumia 800), and Motorola shipping their highest-end devices with sealed internal batteries - it says something about the kinds of tradeoffs that have to be made to get the slim form factors that people identify with the highest end. I remember a time when the highest performance commanded the most awkward and bulky packages - anyone remember the HTC Apache? That said, if you really do want to be able to swap out batteries, there’s always the Bionic (which is essentially the same hardware).
The unfortunate reality is that the RAZR released at quite possibly the worst moment in the Android release schedule. It’s difficult to sell the enthusiast crowd on the same hardware platform in another physical package, and at the same time running a version of Android that’s behind a handset whose release is imminent. The latest crop of Motorola phones will get their well-deserved Android 4.0 upgrade, but 6 months is admittedly a long time to wait and having a locked bootloader makes sidestepping the carrier and OEM testing period overhead impossible as well.
OEMs are starting to recognize that regular updates breed platform loyalty, and are even offering preview ROMs (like Huawei with their ‘demo’ Android 4.0 ROM) that sidestep the carrier testing process. I wager that the enthusiast crowd is willing to deal with some bugs and beta issues in exchange for faster updates, and at the same time help OEMs by providing feedback. It doesn’t make sense to hold the enthusiast crowd to the same bar if they’re willing to run bleeding edge builds. Minimizing support calls resulting from buggy OTA updates is one thing - testing for six months until the phone is nearly obsolete (there’s a running joke that handsets are now obsolete every 8 months) is something else entirely.
In any other circumstance I’d recommend the RAZR for Verizon shoppers purely because it’s the best hardware out right now. As cheesy as it sounds, the Kevlar does lend the phone a unique feel, the hardware is impressively thin, and the display is no worse at color rendering than any other AMOLED panel. It just needs Android 4.0.
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sjprg2 - Monday, December 19, 2011 - link
BIG DEFICIENCY!!!The hands free bluetooth implementation is broken in the sense that it no longer announces whom the caller is. Every previous Motorola phone I have owned tells me who is calling.
Califorina has a handsfree cellphone law and it is very important that I know whom is calling before I answer in the car in freeway traffic. Business calls I may answer, personal calls can wait. This is a deal breaker! I'm stuck with this until they fix it but I am damed unhappy and if I had known I would not have purchased it. It is more of a toy then a useful phone, granted an atractive toy, but still a toy.
Does the Apple 4S bluetooth work?
sjprg
QQBoss - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 - link
I am living in China, and trying to purchase the 4G version of the Razr (unlocked, of course, or at least unlockable). The Chinese version is the XT912, and does not have 4G support (which makes sense, since China doesn't have a 4G network yet). I travel back to the USA periodically, so having 4G for when I am not in China is worth something to me. I have heard said that the non-USA versions of the Razr might have 4G locked off, so this worries me.I found an XT910 brought in by grey market here, but I noticed some things that seem off: 1) it only says Razr, not Droid Razr (so it is probably not the USA version of the phone, I think it was from Singapore) 2) No documentation indicates whether or not it supports 4G, and it doesn't ship with anything other than a basic charger (if there was an external 16 GB microSDHC, it was removed by the seller) 3) Under the different networks supported in the menus, I find one that says "other" with no explanation (could be 4G, but since China networks don't recognize it, it doesn't register?).
I don't care about the lack of the SDHC, I will get a 32 GB class 10 anyway, and chargers are cheap here, but spending roughly US$500 and not getting the actual phone I want seems like a bad option- there are no refunds for grey market. Unfortunately, I didn't write down the baseband ID number. Anyone have a guess?
introiboad - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 - link
Worth mentioning that the RAZR is the second (after the 4S) phone to include support for BLE. Instead of waiting for Google to get their act together and add a standard API to Android, Moto has bundled its own stack (provided by a third party) along with a set of APIs.This makes for very interesting applications such as key fobs, hear rate monitors and many others.
dj christian - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
What is BLE?doobydoo - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
It says what it means in his post title, 'Bluetooth Low Energy' - basically it's Bluetooth 4.0.http://www.bluetooth.com/Pages/Bluetooth-Smart-Dev...
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