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
Performance
The RAZR is the first time we’ve seen TI’s OMAP 4430 SoC with a 1.2 GHz CPU clock, other devices run OMAP 4430 at 1.0 GHz. As a refresher, OMAP4430 consists of two ARM Cortex A9 CPUs with the optional NEON SIMD unit for each core, alongside a PowerVR SGX 540 GPU and the usual accoutrements like the Cortex M3 image subsystem and TI’s encoder/decoder. We’ve gone over the details inside the Bionic piece and Droid 3 before, and I’d encourage you to check those out if you’re curious.
On the browser performance side, the RAZR is no slouch at all. In fact, I wager that part of Blur 6.x included some browser optimizations that dramatically improve scrolling behavior over the Bionic or other Motorola devices. It isn't quite buttery smooth like Android 4.0's stock browser or Samsung's, but it's much improved over the stock experience. This shows in the Vellamo total score more than anything.
Again, one look at those performance differences between the Bionic and RAZR and it's immediately obvious that something more than a simple 20% boost in CPU clock is at play here. Since I've been working on the Galaxy Nexus at the tail end of the RAZR review, I also tossed those numbers in here, and you can get a feeling for the JavaScript performance delta between Android 2.3.x and Android 4.0.1 right now. In the flash department (CraftyMindFlash) we're basically against Vsync in the test we use and will be using another test with more challenging assets soon.
In the synthetics, we see first that Linpack behaves as expected and reflects a 20% boost in CPU clocks over the Bionic. It's in the GPU department that things get a bit interesting, and I again included Galaxy Nexus results that we have on hand from that forthcoming review. The two perform very closely because, from what I can tell, the Galaxy Nexus' OMAP4460 SGX 540 clock is set at 307 MHz (even though OMAP4460 can clock its 540 at up to 384 MHz), very close to the RAZR's OMAP4430 which sets its SGX 540 clock at a maximum of 304 MHz. We'll investigate this further soon in the Galaxy Nexus review as well, but for now know that the RAZR and Galaxy Nexus are pretty evenly matched in the benchmarks.
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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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