Ted Tschopp sent us this user review of the Motorola Razr V3, which he bought as a placeholder until Cingular gets the Treo 650. I think I’m about to follow suit—I was almost sold on switching to Sprint for the Treo 650, but all the weirdo memory problems are pushing me in the wait-and-see camp, as well. But I need a new phone and I think the Razr on Cingular is going to be the one.
Read on for Ted’s first impressions. Be warned: he talks about demons a lot. I think he may own a few 20-sided dice.
We ve all seen it, and of courses the gadget demon races towards our wallet with reckless abandon whenever we see the commercials for it. The real question in our minds is, will feeding him a RAZR v3 shut him up? Well, I m here to tell you the story I have of shutting up my personal demon.
I ve need a new cell phone. I have a Sony T616 and am a long time Palm user with a broken T3. I am a Cingular customer, so as you can imagine I m a bit upset that I will not be getting a Treo 650 any time soon. According to the nice lady at Cingular, I m going to have to wait until January or February until I can have my nice Edge powered Treo. So what am I to do, I ve got this craving for a new device and I m not going to be able to feed it for several months. I have to throw him a bone. I guess the Razr will have to do. I wince a bit as they tell me to plunk down $600.
I saunter out to the car, and tear open the package, slip the SIM card in. The Battery is in, Case Closed, Power on, Finding Network, HELLO MOTO! The beast on my back is now purring, tremors of pleasure course up and down our collective spines.
Several hours later after futzing around with the controls, I have my address book transferred, as well as several caller ID photos transferred over. I ve gone online and downloaded an old fashioned telephone ring tone and I ve changed the themes. I spend the next couple of hours cleaning up the address book, and after about 6 hours I m good to go.
Now at this point I m going to interject. Why did it take me so long? I did all this without a computer. I just used my 2 phones, and the SIM card. Why you might ask; well because I wanted to see if it was possible. The phone comes with Bluetooth and the plug on the side is a mini-USB port, so hooking it up to a computer is no problem.
So what stands out about the phone? One, the ease at which it paired with my Bluetooth headset. Two, the looks. This thing is killer, all I need now is a Walter PPK or PP9. Three, the sound. MP3s, speaker phone, huge area of listen from. (My Sony T616 had to be held just right on the side of my face before I could hear it) Four, the screens and the pretty colors. Five, the interface. All of these are amazing and worth the price of admission.
Which leads me to my two complaints; both of which I can put squarely on the steps of Cingular s steps. Why did they change the default menu and default names for several of the menu Items. It makes reading Motorola s manual very confusing. Multimedia became My MEdia (sic) and the online browser was renamed MEdia Net (sic).
The second complaint is the replacing of the Office Tools (Calendar, Calculator, AIM, etc.) with MEdia Mall? Oh, I know, it s a revenue opportunity and a branding opportunity. Well, I m sorry, I want my calendar, and I want normal naming conventions. Both of these mistakes fly in the face of common sense and good design. I could sense the hackles on my demon raising; he wants to spend some quality time with the boys and girls at Cingular.
So in the end, what do I think? After getting over those two problems, my demon is still purring away like a little kitten. I won t be hearing from him until February. He wishes the phone could capture video. It plays video, but does not capture it. He also wishes the digital camera worked better in high contrast lighting circumstances, but then again the demon s Sigma SD10 has a hard time in high contrast areas. The digital 4x Zoom is cool. Another area which is good, but can still use some room for improvement is in the arena of voice dialing. You still need to train the phone, and there is no way to program commands or numbers yet. It would have been nice to see some form of Voice Recognition.
Overall, great product, not yet up to the Zen of say Apple, but overall the phone lives up to the hype and operates pretty much as advertised. Should you get one? If you are a Cingular customer, and can t get your hands on a Treo 650, of course, your demon will thank you. February is a long way off, and he needs to be fed.
