The MOTOKRZR K1 is Motorola's long-awaited size-crunching update of its iconic RAZR phone, one of the undisputed trend-setting mobiles of the last few years.

Launched as an iconic style phone back in 2004, the RAZR was a marvellous feat of engineering; it was much thinner than the phones that we were used to, and used good old-fashioned metallic material in innovative ways.

But launched at a luxury price, this phone was less than state-of-the-art in other ways, with a relatively standard issue features rundown - and few would have guessed that the RAZR would progress from cult clamshell to mass-market appeal.

The RAZR family of phones continues to sell well - and has spawned a new wave of handsets that put form before function. It has given a new cachet to the Motorola brand, and has led to other enticingly fashioned Motorola handsets with names, such as the PEBL and SLVR.

The latest in the lineage is the MOTOKRZR, designed to have the same appeal as the RAZR but in a shape that will make a new audience fall in love with it. While the RAZR was very thin, it was as a consequence also wider than most clamshells around.

Features

The MOTOKRZR bucks the squash-it-as-flat-as-you-can trend - and is actually a little thicker than its predecessor. At 16mm thick it is plenty thin enough, however - and the couple extra millimetres of girth are more than made up by the fact that this is over a centimetre narrower than the original RAZR.

It's a neat package, made more alluring by a 'Cosmic' blue finish and a glasslike frontage that semi-conceals the external information panel and the camera. The main drawback, however, is the weight. It tips the scales at a surprising 103g - which we reckon is a touch much for a non-3G phone that is trying to attract users because of its petite lines.

The glassy exterior means that you can see the time on the clock, and other key indicators, even when the backlight has switched itself off. But it is not a particularly large screen or high quality one - the passive display's main party trick being to provide a low-resolution viewfi nder when taking pictures of yourself with the phone's clamshell closed.

Inside the clamshell, the display is a good quality TFT-technology affair - although with a 176x220-pixel count is probably the bare minimum that you would want for watching movies that had been shot by the onboard camcorder. Thankfully there is an option for blowing up the 15 frame-per-second 352x288-pixel footage to fi ll the whole screen area in widescreen mode.

Snap-happy

The onboard camera could be a key attraction of this phone. With some two million imaging pixels at its disposal, it offers six times the resolution of that available with the original RAZR V3. On paper at least, if you use the best settings you can get images that can be blown up to 8x6-inch prints using photo paper in your home inkjet printer.

The camera produces reasonable results in good light - and when a decent distance from the subject. However, its fi xed focus system means that close-ups are blurred, and there is not fl ash facility for throwing light into shadowy party pictures. The flat glass shell of the phone also means that the lens's view could be more likely to be blurred with greasy fi ngerprints than with most cameraphones.