New Razr: Is the new design as hip as the old Razr?
Earlier this week, Motorola took the wraps off the new Razr, a next-generation Android update of the classic flip-phone. In a press release, Motorola touted the thinness of the new Droid Razr – a papery 0.27 inches thick – along with a Kevlar-coated frame, Gorilla Glass display, and dual-core 1.2 GHz processor. Today, the first few hands-on previews have begun to leak out across the Web, and judging by the early buzz, the new Razr is a phone to watch.
"I always go back and forth about screen size," writes Dan Rosenbaum of Computerworld. "Although I like the ability to fully operate a phone with only one hand, the larger real estate of the bigger screen [on the Razr] is not without its appeal. If you're used to an iPhone, the Razr will feel like a big slab of glass; if you're an Android customer, you'll absolutely notice the thinness."
Rosenbaum takes special note of the Super AMOLED display, "which is something that has previously been seen only on Samsung phones. These beautiful screens are thin, light and power-stingy – three things that were clearly design goals of the Razr."
Over at CNET, Nicole Lee notes that the Droid Razr has "an immediate wow factor." The dual-core processor on the Razr, Lee adds, yields "a seamless navigational experience. We flipped through screens with speed, with no transition lag at all. We didn't notice any sluggishness when launching and multitasking between several apps, either."
The new Razr, which is available for pre-order later this month, is expected to ship in early November, putting it in direct competition with the recently released iPhone 4S. How does it hold up against the Apple device? Brian Heater of Engadget only tiptoes around the answer, noting that the iPhone is "downright beefy" when compared to the Razr.
The Razr, Heater says, is "just a big, surprisingly light handset. It's a slick, fast, thin phone, that certainly seems worthy of the RAZR name [we] all know and love."
For more tech news, sign up for the weekly BizTech newsletter, which ships every Wednesday.
