Motorola Razr review

The legendary Moto brand gets reborn in an Android skin

Motorola Razr review
The definitive Motorola Razr review

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Motorola razr review

The Motorola Razr's messaging capabilities are as good as anything else from the Android range, meaning you can connect up to the likes of Corporate email over Exchange, webmail (with Yahoo, Windows Live and Googlemail all supported from the start), Facebook and Twitter.

Where the Razr beats most of the competition is the ability to aggregate these messages into an easy to use inbox, where all messages from all the accounts will show up in one place.

It's a slightly clumsy system in practice, as it's not always easy to get to the universal inbox without a couple of taps. For instance, you have to pop into 'Messaging' before you can get access to the icon to open up your full list of messages, and there's no way to put an icon for the universal inbox on the home screen.

Motorola razr review

The widget is supposed to solve that issue, but all this does is bring up a list of unseen messages, and then takes you straight to the Messaging centre again, where you have to click again for the universal inbox. That's after being asked whether you want to mess with the widget settings, so it's not simple to just see all your messages.

It's similar to the Samsung Galaxy S2 in this respect, with its myriad steps to jump into all your messages (and issues with syncing them all at once too) and pales in comparison to the likes of the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and Torch 9810, which both have very easy to use methods of seeing all your messages in one place.

However, we do like the fact you've got offline support for your social networking messages - being able to see and respond to Facebook mails offline and without having to open up the app is a big plus.

Motorola razr review

There are two pre-installed keyboards on the Motorola Razr, with the standard multi-touch option (based on the Gingerbread keyboard from Google) and Swype on offer. Many people will prefer to use Swype, as it's proved a popular option - and we found it to be as good as any other iteration on alternative handsets.

We preferred the multi-touch keyboard though - the prediction was pretty good, and the auto-correct mostly on the money. We would advise you to look at some of the other decent keyboard on the Android Market, such as Swiftkey X, as they can really improve your typing speed too.

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.