DrFunk said:
General impressions of the RAZR:
So yesterday.... got discharged from the Hospital after having my kid (whole other topic and story behind that...) and I had to go pick up a school book from class from a friend who happens to be a VZ sales rep at a store.
Of course all the VZW stores now have the RAZR's out to play with since they are going on sale later this week.
I picked it up.
Immediately the thing felt nice in the hand. Obviously the security device is not helpful in gauging the weight of the product but whatever. The fit and finish of the phone is probably the best of any Android phone to date. The back is slightly textured with a checkerboard pattern and Motorola has taken Apple's approach of adding: "Designed+Imagined by Motorola Made in China" or something like that. I thought... "Really?" It really is the thinnest phone I've seen that amazingly can last a day or more on LTE and look good doing it. Kudos to them for that.
So... the buttons on it. I HATE the power button on the side. HATE, HATE HATE! I have no idea who thought this was a good idea, but it is awkward for turning it on and off again. One could argue that a 4.3" screen would be awkward in turning it off on top, but I'm just too used to that... so that is my bias. Mini-HDMI (I believe) and microSD card slots on the side from a flip down panel are there. No removable battery will have some folks up in arms.
The software.
Gingerbread 2.3.5 w/ MotoBlur Lite. I'm not a fan of any real UI changes or cosmetic upgrades over stock and I'm still hoping that come ICS, launchers or skins are optional to the user. You have your typical widgets + some special ones that are MotoBlur trademarked such as social widgets, battery, wi-fi etc. The screens moved fairly fluidly back and forth. One thing that again (I HATE!) is the apps button on MotoBlur Lite is just a box on the launcher pad at the bottom. No idea why, but whatever. Also once inside the app drawer, things move from right to left and left to right instead of up to down. I believe this was a customization of MotoBlur and not stock Gingerbread and works akin to the way Honeycomb app scrolling does.
Notification tray has a translucent element to it when pulling it down that I think was introduced on the first Atrix phone and now seems to be customary on all Moto Android phones. Looks good and adds a nice touch. Typical VZW bloat, not sure if its removable or not.
Keyboard.
Sucks and sucks hard. By far the worst of the keyboards I've used. To give you a ranking of keyboards (from my vantage point):
iPhone/iPad
Windows Phone 7
Android Honeycomb
others.
Text prediction of the Moto keyboard wasn't great and the keys were too smashed together for my liking. Of course, this is Android so feel free to replace it with a keyboard of choice.
Web browsing:
I couldn't really test "4G" since the display model (for some reason) was stuck on 3G CDMA. Web browsing was decent but not as fast Honeycomb's default browser IMO. NeoGAF loaded up fine and pinch to zoom worked fast.
Overall:
I think with all of the new tech (and I mean new tech... not spec bumped tech that we're getting right now) the RAZR will find its place amongst the DROID faithful, however, with the 720p phones coming out later this month and throughout the next year, I see no reason to get a 480x800 or qHD 960x540 display at this point since ICS is going to be 1280x720. You also have to think about upgrade paths and the fact that this thing will be carrier locked for updates. With all of the amazing phones slated to come out in the next 3 months, I don't see it being a "Must buy" but it is currently the best Android offering in terms of packaging to date.
HOWEVER, the reason why I said I was not impressed is because Gingerbread feels stale. (pun intended). Honeycomb is awesome and ICS is an improvement of that. I feel like if you're buying a smart phone in 2011 you should have Honeycomb or better on it. Android is as much as the software as it is the hardware. I feel like that is why I don't get excited about anything coming out on 2.3.5 Gingerbread now even though its slated to get ICS in 2012 sometime.
