Mototola RAZR V3, 2.5 year review.

I got a phone 2 and a half years ago. The Motorola RAZR V3. It was the coolest phone on the block at the time. All the other phones were these big ol' clunky things the size of a garage door opener that made you look like you were carrying a gun. These new RAZR's though, were ultra skinny, like thinner while closed than any other phone, even the bar phones that could be thinner because they didn't flip shut. Everybody loved them, except me. I thought "I had a cell phone the size of a twinkie and it had like a 3 hour talk time and maybe a day of standby time. This thing will suck for talk time, and I'd break it." Then somebody at work had one and I said "Hey, lemme see that." and slid it into my pocket and it vanished. I didn't feel it, in there with my wallet. I was in love. Any cell phone that could sit in my pocket with my wallet and not rip out the seams in my jeans is cool in my book. So I got one. Today, the phone failed, and needs replaced - So I'm writing this review of the phone, and how it aged, as a eulogy.

Looks
Let's face it, the damn thing is gorgeous. The spartan, solid build and matte black finish scream neo-modern, and the dark chrome reflection from the one piece laser-cut keypad is striking. It's got a very monolithic look to it, the only real detail on the outside being the Motorola logos and the impossibly thin outer buttons. It's wider than most phones, which I think is great, and when it came out, it was the thinnest thing out there. Lots of phones now are just as skinny, if not skinnier - but this svelte granddaddy was lanky first, bud.

UI Design
You know those champion Rubik's Cube players who pick up a jumbled mass of color, and with a few seconds of graceful twirling set down a perfectly aligned cube? I'm like that on this phone. But only because I'd had it for so long. The user interface of the razr sucks goat taint. You can't really customize anything, over half of the menu items send you to places on the web where you buy stuff, nothing is where it should be, and everything useful is 400 menus deep. And it responds slowly. I set up a shortcut to my alarm clock so now I press the menu button and 9 to get my alarms, instead of menu button, click over to settings, then down to tools, then to alarms. I also made use of one of the few customizable things - the 4 way button. That circle around the main button now launches my video camera, calendar, address book, and calculator. I generally enter the commands to do what I want to do and and have to wait and watch the menus at the phone catches up.

Calls
Calls sounded like... well, they sounded like phone calls. Nothing to point out, here. It performs admirably, as far as the actual sound quality of calls. The phone itself causes any issues I had with calls. The earpiece sounds fine, if you have it aimed right. If you slide it back a bit, it fires into the flesh of the ear and you can't hear anything. It's like the call dropped. This phone is real finicky about where you have the earpiece. And don't try to talk in the wind. Windy areas will cause the dreaded whoosh of call decimation and the other party will think an atom bomb is going off. The speakerphone is fine.

Other
I didn't use bluetooth much, but it seems to work ok. The side buttons are the thickness of a human hair, and as such can be difficult to press. The camera is a pile of worthless grainy shit and I hate it. The battery tends to seat just slightly wrong and makes it so the battery door doesn't latch on all the way and makes a pointy bit on the back of the phone. Talk time and standby time are pretty good. I can't quite fit the whole phone in my mouth. The screen and keypad smoosh up against my face when I talk so I have to go after it with alcohol swabs all the time to keep it from looking like I dropped it in the sewer. Pictures you take with the camera don't fit the screen, so you end up with black borders or a crop of the center of the picture, and it's hard to get a good wallpaper out of it. The design of the phone make it look like it was intended to defeat RADAR. The usb plug is unprotected, and thus a gunk magnet. The case juts out all square and nasty around the usb plug - so much so that it bothered me enough to sand it down to bevel off the corners. The little fob/lanyard attachment thingy is pointless, and impossible to clean under.

Wear
After 2.5 years, the phone shows signs of age. The little "M" logo fell off the earpiece. The plastic behind the keypad that makes the numbers glow has yellowed significantly. The gasket around the screen has pushed in some between the actual screen and the plastic front of the screen assembly. The case is scratched and dented here and there. There is awful brassing around the metal corners, especially on the top at the edges of the hinge. The keypad itself is wearing and brassing at the corners. There is gunk in every tiny little crevice that I just can't get out. If you don't get the battery in just right, it will look like the battery is nearly dead, and the phone will beep at you to charge it, even though you don't need to. Oh, and the keys don't work. Today, I got it out to make a call, and none of the keys on the entire phone work at all. Except the hangup/power key. it will power the phone on and off. I don't know why this happened, and neither do the many other people out there who had the same thing happen to them. In any case, I can still take calls, but no longer make them, and I have to replace my phone.

I've gotten very used to this phone, and I was actually tiring of it and salivating for all the killer new phone features out there ("3.2 megapixel camera? SWEET!"), but I was hoping to wait a while longer before having to bury this one in a drawer somewhere. R.I.P. RAZR. Ye shall be missed.