Motorola V3 (Not specified)

I have worked in the cellular industry for a long time and seen phone come and go. Motorola is usually at the cutting edge of phones and the V3 RAZR phone is no exception. I will give a short list of Pros and Cons of the phone and then expound a little more on then for those that care to get into more detail.

Pros:

+ Design
+ Structure (a solid frame)
+ Size
+ Battery Life
+ Keypad
+ Sound Quality
+ Customizability
+ Bluetooth
+ Messaging Software

Neutrals:

~ Speakerphone
~ Side Buttons
~ Software (can be slow, can be fast, can work great, can fail)

Cons:

- Vibration - hard to feel even in a tight pocket (could be due to size)
- Camera (easy to use, but only VGA (640x480 res))
- Sound Loudness (hard to hear in noisy places)
- Hinge (hard to open with one hand, same to close)
- Price

Pros -

The phone is solid. It is made out of the same material the Apple Powerbook G4 is made from, anodized aluminum. It is also the sleekest phone of the market coming in at 89 x 53 x 13.9 mm. It also is extremely light at 95 grams!

The battery life is pretty standard for phone coming out today with a 750 mAh Li-Ion battery that has maximum talk and standby times of 3.0 and 200 hours respectively under optimal conditions.

The keypad stays true to the design of the phone and is user friendly. I like the feel and design myself but I could foresee problems if your color blind (silver) or if your visually impaired.

The sound is fantastic for such a small phone. It was this one quality that I was most worried about. Everything worked perfectly when it came to incoming and outgoing calls. The only Con here was the speaker phone which will be discussed a little more below.

Customizability is incredible ... almost to the point that it might be a tad bit overwhelming if you don’t take the time to figure out how everything works. I still feel this is a Pro though as I can’t expect too many people would get this phone and not want to take the time to learn all the features. Everything can be customized but I do recommend you set a side more than just an evening to learn it all!

Bluetooth is now becoming more of a standard feature but I am sure glad to see it on this phone. It was a good decision on the part of Motorola and only adds to its futuristic style. Along with this the messaging feature is about par with the Motorola operating software and really doesn’t need any improvements.

I should also mention that this is a Quad band phone so for a world traveler (like me) this was a HUGE selling point!

Neutrals:

The speaker phone was nothing to write home about. It worked ... but that’s about all you could say for it. More often than not I would just end up turning it off and talking into the phone. If you have Bluetooth set up you shouldn’t really need to use it all that often and it didn’t work against the phone ... it just wasn’t the best it could be.

If you have used the V551 and similar models Motorola seems to be trying new uses for the side buttons ... but I have only found them more distracting than beneficial. One thing that irks me is that its quite temperamental when it comes to volume control and making the phone go silent.

Along with this there were no upgrades to the OS from previous models. While on par with what you would expect for most phones I thought there would be improvements here.

Cons:

Are pretty self explanatory but they should be taken into consideration before buying!