Motorola Razr V3 Mobile Review

The Motorola Razr V3 cell phone is both very distinctive and also very attractive.
Combining its classy and stylish appearance with quadband GSM service, super-strength Bluetooth, color displays on both sides of the flip, long battery life, and a camera, it seems to have everything anyone would want..

Capabilities and Specifications:

The manual which comes with the phone is surprisingly silent about the phone’s technical specifications, and some of the other reviews on the Internet quote incorrect data. I’m basing my facts and figures on the material on Motorola’s own site, except where it too is wrong.

The V3 measures 3.5″ x 2.1″ x 0.55″ when folded closed and weighs 3.4 ounces. This makes it moderately - but not very - compact in terms of length and breadth; its most notable feature being how thin it is.

The phone came with four different manuals - a warranty brochure, a quick start guide, a service guide, and the main user manual. Interestingly the main user manual was very much shorter than the V600 manual - a mere 104 pages compared to 268 for the V600.

Battery Life and Related Issues:

Reviews commonly seem to quote battery life of as much as 200 hours of standby time or three hours of talk time. Another source (Amazon) claims 6.67 hours of talk time or 250 hours of standby time. Motorola itself says Talk Time: Up to 200 to 430 minutes Standby Time: Up to 180 to 290 hours Standard Battery: 680 mAh Li-ion Motorola’s reference to a 680-mAh battery is rather surprising. Although I’d assumed that Motorola’s own website would be the best source of official data, the fact is I have never seen a 680 mAh battery. Out of perhaps 50 V3s that I’ve inspected, all have had a 710-mAh battery. Some other reviewers have even referred to a 750-mAh battery, but I’ve never seen one of those, either.

Limitations:

The phone is very attractive, and in some respects (eg quad-band and color) full featured. So what are the limitations that you might encounter and be frustrated by.

It has no removable memory card. It has just over 5MB of internal memory that is shared between the phone book, ring tunes, pictures and video clips, and downloaded files and programs. This can quickly fill to overflowing. In contrast, I have a removable 128MB memory card in my ‘old’ Nokia 3650 (released in mid 2003) so it never runs out of capacity.

A basic fixed focus low resolution camera - 0.3 Megapixels, inadequate these days when other cameras offer 1 MP and some offer 2MP.No video recording.

Reasonably large in terms of length and breadth, although definitely very thin Basic and clutzy phone book/contact manager Proprietary iTap rather than industry standard T9 text entry meaning you have to learn a whole new interface for efficient text messaging

No IR port and data connectivity is usually sold as an extra rather than as an included feature No high speed data capability such as EDGE Can’t add an external antenna How best to buy a Motorola Razr V3