Software
How Motorola has introduced Android 4.0 on
its Europe-bound RAZR is another big surprise: it hasn't gone so far from the
Android designs seen on Google's Nexus devices. The phone manufacturer (now
part of Google itself) has, however, added some new extras. Swiping to the
right from the main home screen will bring you to a quick settings menu, this
is an alternative to the WiFi and GPS shortcuts found in the drop down menu on
normal Android devices.
Home screen window is decorated in the form
of Circles, including the widgets that show some necessary information such as
weather, time and battery. Motorola also keeps the Smart Actions, bringing on
some degree of automation to your phone, whether it involves uninterrupted
sleep or efforts to maintain the battery life a bit longer. This feature still
requires some efforts from the users, but this is only dependent on how the
users want to customize their devices. If you are willing to recreate your own
style, you will be rewarded yourself with better battery performance and less
interruptions.
Performance and battery life
When we benchmarked the RAZR i recently, we ran it through the same
battery tests, in case any firmware updates brought any performance
improvements. Motorola claims the Intel Atom Z2480 processor inside is capable
of "up to 2GHz".
Motorola RAZR i
·
Quadrant: 4,226
·
Vellamo: 1,928
·
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms): 1,077
·
AnTuTu: 6,175
·
GLBenchmark Egypt
Offscreen (fps): 41
·
CF-Bench: 3,115
Motorola Droid
RAZR M
·
Quadrant: 4,944
·
Vellamo: 2,442
·
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms): 1,951
·
AnTuTu: 6,364
·
GLBenchmark Egypt
Offscreen (fps): 56
·
CF-Bench: 9,392
ZTE Grand X IN
·
Quadrant: 2,710
·
Vellamo: 1,550
·
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms): 1,355
·
AnTuTu: N/A
·
GLBenchmark Egypt
Offscreen (fps): N/A
·
CF-Bench: 873
The results remain generally unchanged, but
after spending a week with the device, we'd like to admit that the web browser
still gives an unbelievable performance. The phone made a decent effort on more
processor-intensive tasks, including a brief game of Max Payne. Due to that
Intel chip, however, the RAZR i doesn't support all the apps on Google Play.
Two notable examples are Adobe AIR, which underpins several media streaming
apps, and Adobe Flash. Having said that, the compatibility has improved since
six months ago; this can be proved by noting that two popular apps, Netflix and
Temple Run, are now installable on RAZR i. Also, just a few days ago, too,
Google updated its Chrome app, which now can be ran perfectly fine on any
Intel-powered devices running Android 4.0.
Dead
Trigger on RAZR i
We had a chance to make a comparison
between RAZR i wand Droid RAZR M. Beside the tests stated above, model Medfield
gives faster reaction to any motions detected. Opening the two phones, RAZR i
reached its home screen 12 seconds faster than its brother, the Snapdragon. The
web browser Chrome and the camera on the two phones took similar periods to
open and run. It is welcome to see that the color balance is now much better
than that on the Verizon version; this result satisfied the entire camera tests
provided.
Aside from the wonderful performance, we
also want to see how the battery works – will it be better than the RAZR M,
which has almost everything the same as the RAZR i. In the battery test – we
kept playing some videos continuously with 50% of brightness, turn on WIFI and
3G, open up emails and social network applications. It ended up working for 9
hours non-stop, which is 1 hour better than RAZR M. That's a marginal victory,
but as with the LTE version, we were more impressed with how the phone managed
to go the distance on typical or mildly intensive use. In other words, we never
had to look for the power point throughout the whole day.
Conclusion
Intel keeps providing a series of high
quality phones – RAZR i is a better, more luxury than San Diego, although we
are still waiting for Intel to stand up and make a big breakthrough to the
smartphone’s market. Perhaps, once they can deal with the LTE technology, they
would introduce to the world some more powerful phones (and obviously more
expensive as well). The Medfield 2Ghz processor brings up the performance that
you can hardly separate it with the Snapdragon dual-core. RAZR i has taken down
many average-rate smartphones on the market such as Xperia P by having a stable
hardware, fast UI and surprising high quality camera. If you are hoping for the
widest screen or the strongest performance, you might be a bit disappointed
here, however, with a good price, and even free if you sign for a contract in
England – RAZR i is not a bad choice at all.
Gorgeous
RAZR i
Advantages
·
Good battery life
·
Stable design
·
High quality camera
Disadvantages
·
Does not support some Android’s applications
·
PenTile screen cannot display as smooth as
expected
Verdicts
·
RAZR i is very joyful to use, it is more than
enough to do many different tasks. Nevertheless, there is still a long way to
improve the phone, making its Intel Medfield core compatible for every
Android’s applications.
RAZR
i is very joyful to use, it is more than enough to do many different tasks.
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Specifications
·
Device type: Smart
phone
·
OS: Android (4.1.2, 4.1,
4.0.4)
·
Dimensions: 4.82 x
2.40 x 0.33 inches (122.5 x 60.9 x 8.3 mm)
·
Weight: 126 g
·
Body material: Kevlar
·
Rugged: Water proof
(Splash)
·
Battery capacity: 2,000 mAh
·
System chip: Intel
Atom Z2460
·
Processor: Single
core, 2,000 MHz, Saltwell
·
Graphics processor: PowerVR
SGX540 @ 400 MHz
·
System memory: 1024 MB
RAM / 8192 MB ROM
·
Maximum User Storage: 5
GB
·
Storage expansion: microSD,
microSDHC up to 32 GB
·
Bluetooth: 2.1, EDR
·
Wi-Fi: 802.11 a, b, g,
n, n 5GHz
·
Mobile hotspot: Yes
·
USB: USB 2.0
·
Connector: microUSB
·
Features: Mass storage device, USB charging
·
Other: NFC, DLNA,
Computer sync, OTA sync
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