Thin, hip and popular

Category: Review on Motorola Razr V3i Mobile Phone

Posted by: 15-Oct-2006

Strengths: It’s a RAZR – that’s enough for some people

Weaknesses: Mediocre camera, not enough memory

Motorola changed the cell phone landscape with its original RAZR phone – it was unlike any other phone on the market and it sold like hotcakes. The V3i is a fine update, pleasant to hold and fun to operate. It’s still a little bit wider than most other cellphones, and it’s disappointing that Motorola couldn’t have done something about that. Or at least they could have made the front display screen on the outside of the case a little bigger – at 19 x 16mm, it’s small, hard to read, and attracts greasy fingerprints.

The 262K-color screen inside the front lid is bright and sharp, but it’s still the same old 176 x 220 pixels of the original RAZR – why no upgrade here? Elsewhere, the 1.23-megapixel camera does a decent job of shooting off-the-cuff photos, and the V3i is the second Motorola phone to include iTunes software – the 100-song limit isn’t much, but it’s a nice bonus feature. It’s no easy to navigate, though – using the key pad to wade through the menus to find a song is tedious and time-consuming.

Considering that the V3i comes with a decent built-in camera and a music player, you’d think it would have a hefty load of memory – but it doesn’t. The RAZE V3i comes with a meager 12MB, which barely covers the most basic functions. You can boost the memory, though, microSD memory cards (also known as TransFlash) and the V3i comes equipped with a 512MB card. And the V3i has one annoying feature – you can hang up a call by closing the handset, unless you’re using the speakerphone, in which case you have to end your call manually. Camera performance isn’t great, with photos coming out blurry and dull.