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4 out of 4 people found this review helpful
2.5 stars
"So much potential wasted"
Pros: Great reception and call quality, good looks, exellent camera and bluetooth capability
Cons: VZW menu interface, poor battery life, software glitches
Summary: I would like to give this phone a 7. It does perform its most important role fairly well. Sound quality is great, bluetooth works very well with my Nokia headset and the phone gets good reception.
Additionally it is a good looking phone and the steel casing is asthetically and functionally pleasing.
Now that we've got the pleasantries out of the way. I'm very dissapointed with the phone's software. I suspect most if not all of the problems are due to VZW's universal interface because I didn't have any of these problems with the Motorola interface on my e815. There are long stretches of highway that I've hit in ND and IL where I have a strong signal but when I make a phone call I get a message telling me that the cellular provider I'm trying to reach is unavailable. The roaming software was up to date and my previous phone (e815) allowed me to make calls there. Verizon doesn't have a clue. So thats a pretty big strike if your phone can't even connect to 911 when your driving on long stretches of open highway in subzero temps.
My first Razr2 would randomly shut off when I closed it. It also had this glitch where sometimes the alarm would go off/sound and other times it would go off visually but not play the ringer...no matter what the volume was set at. Verizon replaced the phone and I no longer have the shutoff problem but I still can't rely on the alarm because it has shown the same behavior. Verizon doesn't have an answer and no software updates have been released. Thats a strike, I like using my phone as an alarm.
Then there are the small things that aren't necessarily problems but annoying nonetheless. The text messaging solution is a small nightmare. When you send a message you get a full screen display telling you you're "Sending Message". It last for a minimum 3 seconds but can take up to 10 sec or longer if the message fails or you have week signal. During this time you can't do anything on the phone. If you close it and reopen you'll think you're in the clear but the phone will be non-responsive and then you'll get the screen telling you text message sent. Then you can use the phone. If you send a media message you can forget about doing anything on the phone for at least a minute. But wait!, its gets worse. In this day and age of mass texting some genius decided to put a small limit on the inbox size, so right around 80 messages you will start getting an annoying "Your inbox is 85% full" message. The phone has 40mb of internal memory! So you might be thinking, why not just delete messages. Well deleting messages is an affair in itself. Hitting the delete button will buy you at least a 2 minute visit to the penalty box. A nice little logo happily rotates in the center of your screen while you fume at your inability to use your phone. Then theres the issue of the front screen. The front screen on this phone is bigger than some phones' main screen!, yet you can't read text messages on it as Motorola intended. Verizon decided listening to music and having an additional voice command button (there is already one of the side of the phone) was more important. A small envelope on the front screen alerts you to text message. It takes up maybe a quarter of the screen or less, leaving plenty of room to read the text or at least know who its from. But somehow that would just make too much sense. The only way to have "texter ID" is if you have a picture of the contact. That way you'll see their picture over the text icon.
You can still set shortcuts to the up, down, left, right buttons but for some reason you can no longer change the shortcuts for the 2 softkeys. Whats more, you can have to select shortcuts from a predetermined list, so if your application is not there your outta luck. Previous motorola phones were a lot more user friendly in that you cold set a shortcut for just about any application on the phone. And you could set it for almost any menu level too. So you could set your shortcut for the bluetooth menu or you could set it for a specific part of the bluetooth menu. Like on/off or device select. You can't do that anymore.
The calendar has also lost some functionality. No longer can you scroll through the months with the * and # keys. No, you have to cursor down through all the weeks of the month to get to the next one. What gives!?
Verizon has said they will allow me to exchange the phone for a different model outside of the expired return period since they can't fix any of the problems with the alarm or coverage, but for now I've decided to keep the Razr2 because I don't like any of verizon's other phones. What a waste, this phone has so much potential.
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