Motorola RAZR Pro Reviews

Beautiful and well built, and with a fabulous AMOLED screen, but battery life is poor and the camera lets the side down

Motorola have sure created one impressive, buzzworthy phone. That's not saying that the Motorola RAZR will become a best-seller like its granddaddy but it's the trump card in Moto's deck. The RAZR is a phone to be seen with and a phone to brag about. So, ask yourselves - if a friend showed you the Motorola RAZR, will you be impressed enough to want one too? Most people will, we think. The original RAZR was famous for being famous. The XT910 is a droid, not a celebrity. Though it certainly looks the part.

The Motorola Droid RAZR XT910 certainly isn't perfect. It has a slightly-too-large body, inelegant raised bezel and pentile AMOLED screen, but it has so many other qualities to put it above the competition that on balance it's one we recommend. The screen is dazzling and great for watching video, which the phone excels at playing, there are some great software features and, sure, it's impressively slim too - if you like that sort of thing. It may divide opinion but the new Razr is definitely at the cutting edge.

The Motorla Razr is an irritating smartphone. It has a large, high quality screen, but the chassis seems oversized. It is thin, but there's a bubble at the upper edge. The use of a microSIM irritated us too, as we swap SIMs a lot.

At £450 the Razr isn’t a cheap phone but it is worth every penny of the asking price. If you were to put a gun to my head and ask me to find fault other than the seemingly wayward Wi-Fi reception, I’d be stuffed because I can’t think of anything. It’s thin, light, fast, handsome, solid, graced with one of the best screens on any phone and is built to a near weapons grade specification.

Motorola needed a phone like the Razr in its arsenal, and now it has one to be proud of. It's got all the dual-core power of the Atrix, plus a superior screen; more importantly, it's jumped from a squat chassis to a sumptuous slimline affair that glides into the pocket. However, we're not sure about the way the screen is swamped in the frame of the phone, nor about the certain elements Moto has locked down - plus the battery life remains an issue. Looks- and functionality-wise, there are many comparisons to be made with the Samsung Galaxy S2 - and we can't help but recommend that latter over this phone, with a superior range of customisation on offer and a snappier UI to boot.

Is the RAZR a good phone? Yes, on the whole it is. The important issue here is that it pales in comparison to its immediate and more recently launched competitors (iPhone 4S, HTC Sensation XL, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Samsung Note) in areas that consumers tend to nitpick on. For S$888, the RAZR is a reasonable buy as it is a phone with character (albeit fragmented), but patient Android fans should wait out for a while longer for better Android alternatives.

We don't usually feel confused by a phone. But the Razr offerers so much with one hand, then bats it away with the other. We like the unusual design. Motorola hasn't just "done an Apple" and built a clone phone. What it's done is thought about the style and design, and put together something that impresses from the moment you hold it. We like the screen, although we're not crazy about AMOLED, we quickly found that it was bright, clear and detailed. The 256ppi 4.3-inch screen is not, technically, that high resolution, but it didn't look especially coarse to us, and we soon settled in to its typical AMOLED green tone. Gamers will love the vibrancy of the colours too, which are very impressive. We still think that the iPhone and HTC Sensation have the best screens on the market - the iPhone wins, because of its high resolution IPS display - but the Razr doesn't disappoint either. If the battery life wasn't good, we'd moan about the lack of removable power, but we don't have any major longevity issues. We hate the micro SIM, but that's just the onward march of progress. The speed, for us, is a worry. Why do we see stuttering when returning from the menu to the home screen. The stock text message app is a little oppressive too, with its dark colours and basic layout. We suggest you check out Go SMS in the Market, if you want something more stylish and customisable. The Motorola customisations are fine, for the most part. The messaging app for email and social networks is reasonable, but we don't like all of our interactions jumbled up in to one place, so, long-term, we wouldn't actually use it.

There's no arguing that the original Motorola RAZR was an iconic device that's seemingly forever ingrained into our minds, but more importantly, it showed us the kind of ingenuity behind Motorola. In a time when high-end smartphones seem to be in a cutthroat race, the Motorola RAZR is able to captivate our attention thanks to the engineering marvel it is. For something so thin and light, it's hard to fathom how remarkably strengthened the phone is to offer superior durability. As much as some of us are eagerly awaiting Ice Cream Sandwich on board of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Nexus, there should be no cause for alarm because it's announced to be coming to the RAZR in the future too. A natural competitor to the Motorola RAZR in the Android camp is the Samsung Galaxy S II, which is also pretty thin, and is lighter and more compact than the RAZR, offering mighty dual-core performance too, and way better camera/camcorder. If you are looking for a more distinct design, you can check the HTC Sensation XE with Beats Audio, whose camera is only marginally better than the one on the RAZR. In iOS land, the iPhone 4S offers smaller screen in a heavier handset, whose steal and glass chassis differs markedly from the design concept of the RAZR. You will be greeted with a more capable camera here, too, and will also have the iOS apps to serve and entertain your needs.

A stylish and powerful Android handset, which should stay better-looking for longer than the competition