Motorola RAZR V3 Review

Pick up a RAZR V3 today and the first impression still holds: a clamshell under 14 mm thick, in anodised aluminium, weighing 95 grams, with a keypad etched from a single sheet of metal and lit electric blue through the gaps. Nothing else in 2004 looked like it, and Cingular sold it as a luxury at 499.99 dollars on a two-year contract that November. The phone inside the object was ordinary.

The VGA camera had no autofocus and no flash when Nokia's 6630 and Sony Ericsson's S700 carried 1.3 megapixel sensors; Motorola's own software lagged behind every keypress and buried the address book three menus deep, and Cingular's firmware locked down Bluetooth file transfer so you could not even get the photos out. The 2.2 inch 176 by 220 TFT inside was bright and sharp for the year, the 96 by 80 external panel useful, and the 680 mAh cell managed a couple of days if you left the screen alone.

Reliability was a mixed record: dust crept between the plastic window and the LCD, the flex cable through the hinge wore until the screen went white, and the battery door worked loose. None of that slowed it down. Motorola cut the price to 199, then 99, then free with contract, moved 50 million by mid-2006 and 130 million in the end, and had nothing to follow it with. The innovation grade is for the thing you could hold; the rest of the marks are for the phone you had to use.