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Is it any good?

The V3x is a great phone with a few problems. The size and features are great. The accessories and supporting software leave me cold.

Don’t read the rest of this post expecting a long, detailed review. I will focus on the things that matter to me about the V3x. If I’ve skipped anything you’d like me to cover, or if I’m mistaken, say so in the comments and I’ll try and fill in the blanks.

My needs

My needs aren’t spectacular. I have spent a long, long time being very happy with a Nokia 3200. That should say something.

Why I needed a new phone:

• I got a TomTom Go 300 GPS Navigation unit that talks Bluetooth to a 3G phone to access a traffic web-service for route optimisation. Sadly this has no useful effect in Australia… yet, but TomTom claim to be working on it.
• My 3200 had intermittent problems with its (top left) select button. The select button was vital to unlocking the phone so I could call people, and also vital for accessing the 3200’s only trade-show feature — holding down # to turn the “torch” on and off.
• My spouse got one and it seemed to meet with her approval. There was tension having to arrange places for Nokia and non-Nokia phones to be conveniently charged around the house, so standardising on one phone model was attractive.
• Keeping up with the Joneses

The most important features of a mobile phone for me (in descending order of importance):

1. Audio quality,
2. Headset quality,
3. Mute,
4. Battery life, and
5. Speakerphone

Yes, you read correctly. Mute at number 3 with a bullet and no sign of 3G porn.

Most of the time that my mobile and I spend together I’m on mute. That’s because I use my mobile phone to attend conference calls and meetings while I’m out of the office. Usually when I’m out of the office on a call I’m around screaming children and clattering dishes. If you have spent any time on an audio conference bridge, you very quickly become thankful that mobile phones have mute capabilities.

Physical design

Size: 86.3 x 47 x 24.4 millimeters

Compact. Palm-sized when closed, and not so small you have to operate it with a magnifying glass and tweezers. It is small and flat enough to fit in a pants pocket unobtrusively, and rounded so you don’t have nasty sitting-down accidents. It opens up to be large enough to reach from your ear to your mouth and feels like a “real” phone hand set that you speak into rather than away from.

Weight: 96 grams

Solid-feeling. Seems to be constructed with a plastic shell around electronics mounted in an aluminium chassis. The guy in the shop said the solid build (more solid than the slimmer, non-3G, V3) helps with speakerphone audio. The speakerphone is pretty good, but is it because of a solid chassis? Dunno.

Physical external connections: Mini-USB

The Mini-USB port is the only physical plug. It is used for:

1. Recharging with one of the two supplied AC-adapter chargers
2. Plugging in the stereo headset
3. Connecting to the USB port on the PC

This means you can’t recharge the phone and use the headset at the same time, something the Nokia 3200 could do with a socket for recharging and headset.

Also of note (because someone asked) is that the phone has a slot for a micro-SD card next to the SIM and battery to help with your MP3-dependent lifestyle. My V3x came with an almost adequate 64MB micro-SD card. Strangely I can take photographs into the phone’s memory, but the option to take photographs directly onto the SD-card results in mysterious sounding error messages.

Two displays

One display, a 96 x 80 pixel colour display, is on the outside of the clam-shell. This small display gives you caller ID, the time, message counts and ringer setting feedback while the case is closed.

The large display, 320 x 240 TFT, is only visible and active when the phone is open. Though, like the light in the refrigerator, I can’t be sure it’s not active when it’s shut.

Two cameras

One camera is “VGA” and faces you as you look at the main display. This is the video camera used for showing your face in video calls. The other camera is 2 mega pixels, and faces outwards for still and video photography with the large display as viewfinder.

Here are two examples of V3x photographs. One photograph shows the macro mode to show the bundled headset and the Blue Ant 3x Bluetooth headset I purchased as a replacement (more about that below). The other photograph is an attempt to demonstrate how the phone deals with long shots. Click each one to view larger versions.

This is a pretty serviceable camera.

Soft features

I can’t say I’ve taken a thorough tour of all of the features of the RAZR. The features I like most are voice dialling and the browser.

The built-in no-name browser works well for the one URL I go to with my piddling data allowance: Gmail.

Voice dialing is very good. There is a button on the side of the phone to activate voice commands, and the hook/flash on the headset activates voice commands too. The voice recognition is much better than the voice synthesis the phone uses to confirm whom you’re dialling, but it’s still a great feature for driving.

Mute is a little hard to get to. Once you’re on a call, it’s about 5 clicks away to mute, and two key-presses to unmute. This seemed a little lame, so I purchased a Bluetooth headset (see below) that has a mute function. The problem is that the Blue Ant 3x bluetooth headset has three buttons in, if you excuse my ASCII art, a small “(o)” button formation over the earpiece. The “o” is the hook/flash button which is also used for answering calls, power, and waking up the phone’s voice dialling according to the phone’s state and the length of key press. Pressing the “(” increases volume. “)” is volume decrease. Holding “(” and “)” down simultaneously mutes. Accidentally pressing “o” while on a call hangs up the phone. A few experiments convinced me that it was impossible for me to mute the headset without hanging up the damn phone.

A lot of online reviews say the V3x doesn’t have an operating system. Of course it does, but not a name brand one that Motorola is happy to talk about (greater than 50% chance it’s VxWorks?). In mobile phone speak, not having an operating system means it doesn’t run a Palm, Windows or Symbian variant. It does have a J2ME engine. If you’re enthusiastic, the development guide is available online.

Audio quality

Audio quality is pretty good. Pretty good means it does not sound as good as my old Nokia 3200 brick which I consider very good. Although the headphone audio is just good, the microphone audio transmitted seems much better quality than the Nokia 3200 on a quick voice mail test.

One item of note is the very funky-looking stereo headset. I spent two hours on conference calls with the bundled headset soon after getting the phone and noticed two things about it:

1. It’s uncomfortable. You can see the shape of the ear pieces in the macro photo above. These ear pieces don’t fit in my ear comfortably. The ear buds fall out of my ears and I spend a lot of time holding them in place or putting them back into my ears.
2. Talking seems to make the phone go half-duplex. When I’m talking on this headset I can’t hear any incoming audio. There isn’t any sidetone either, so it’s an unsatisfactory experience on the whole.

I quickly went out and purchased a Blue Ant 3x Bluetooth headset, which has much better audio quality, seems to make a good fist of being full-duplex, and stays in my ear.

PC Connectivity

The PC connectivity suite has some entertaining variations to the theme I identified earlier. People who own this phone have no respect for other peoples’ personal space…

…or they are modern-day Plastic Bertrands:

Moral: If you see someone with a RAZR V3x operating in camera mode — stand clear.

The PC software links to the phone through Bluetooth or USB to establish a 3G Internet connection. Useful for people with laptops and a better phone plan than my Telstra “Cheap-Ass” AU$20/month 3G plan.

Contacts and schedules can be synchronised with Outlook and Outlook Express, or imported and exported to text. The sync process I have used is manual, though there is an automated process that seems to rely on performing a sync when the Phone Connect application starts up at PC login. This is nowhere near as seamless as the sync function on a Windows or Symbian system, but I haven’t explored sufficiently to figure out if I need to be more charitable or damn it utterly.

In the end…

1. Audio quality is good
2. Bundled headset quality is poor. Remedied by buying a Bluetooth headset
3. Mute is less convenient than I’d like it to be, but it exists
4. Battery life is excellentgood (I bow to Sunny’s mobile cred)
5. Speakerphone is very good

I like it.