It’s the return of the most important phone in Motorola’s history, the Razr.  And true to its name, the new version is adequately slim at only 7mm, widening a bit at the top end.

Speaking of top ends, this phone is placed right up there as a competitor to the best Smartphones on the market (sic: iPhones and Galaxys) and it’s got a thick kevlar back cover to protect against the beating it’s in for from the bosses.

The first striking feature of the phone is the massive 6.8cm 960×540 resolution screen, again leaving the buyer with a feeling that they’re getting a mini-tablet. And the screen doesn’t disappoint either with a great 1.2GHz dual core processor to handle the back-end heavy lifting. Surfing on this device is a dream, it’s great for the couch and on demand TV trivia searching.

The size of the device is also its un-doing though. It’s just too big to hold in one hand and tap away at those moments when your other hand is occupied…like when you’re driving for example. At least the Galaxy Note doesn’t pretend to be a one handed phone.
This was quite annoying.

The Razr does feature Swype input as a choice, but I’ve never used it on any phone for an extended period of time, I just prefer tapping. And when you do tap, you can’t see what buttons you’re pushing because of your fat fingers. I couldn’t find a setting to turn on button pop-ups that appear when you’ve hit the correct button, so you land up spending a lot of time correcting and backspacing.

The new Razr runs on Android and small pockets of brilliance exist for example in Navigation which is nice. They’re quite generous too with the onboard space of 16GB expandable via SD to another 16GB.

So final verdict on a phone I just know everyone is going to be asking me about?
There’s no denying that the Razr deserves its place at the top of the pile against the more expensive phones in the market. There are some brilliant features, a decent screen and processor and a battery whose lifecycle is no better or worse than the iPhone 4S.

The irritating nuances like it being too big for one handed typing and having to guess what button you’ve just hit though really hurt the Razr’s chances as an alternative to the Galaxy.

It’s a decent effort, but I would go with something else.

What’s it cost? R7 000
From where? www.motorola.com/razr

THE MOTOROLA RAZR AD