Motorola Razr i review

Battery life

If you're after a work horse that won't let you down, we heartily recommend the Motorola Razr i. Yes, it's small - but it has a whopping 2000mAh battery inside.

OK, so 2000mAh may not be ginormous these days - but when you consider that the Samsung Galaxy S3 is powered by a 2100mAh pack and that has a much larger, sharper screen that itself is almost bigger than the entire Motorola Razr i handset, you can see how this phone is instantly going to be better off.

Motorola hasn't given exact estimates away for the talk time, but various sources point to claims of about 20 hours.

The fact of the matter is, talk time estimates are a load of baloney these days anyway, because we don't use our phones solely to talk. Screen time on is a huge drain, as is the fluctuating strength of internet connections.

In our usage, we took the Motorola Razr i off charge on Sunday morning at about 10am. We then spent about 45 minutes setting it up, downloading apps and so on.

We made about 20 minutes worth of calls over the course of the day, had Twicca checking our Twitter account every 15 minutes and had push email on via Gmail and Exchange. We sent about 25 emails between the two accounts. We also streamed some music over Bluetooth for a 10 minute journey and took a handful of photos.

By bedtime at 11pm, the battery was still showing 32%. The following day, we used it sparingly, making about 10 minutes' worth of phone calls, about 15 minutes of browsing and sending a handful of WhatsApp and text messages.

The phone cut out shortly after 6pm. That's 30 hours on one charge with moderate use. Pretty good going in this day and age, and certainly better than competitors.

Connectivity

And for such a small little fella, the Motorola Razr i really packs a punch when it comes to connectivity. All the usual suspects are there - Wi-Fi, GPS, HSDPA, NFC and Bluetooth. All work as well as you would expect them to, and we had no issues with any of them.

In particular, we were pleased with the speed of GPS to lock on indoors. It's still trumped by the Samsung Galaxy S2 and Samsung Galaxy S3 - but not far off.

When we connected the phone via a cable to our Mac, we were instantly prompted to install the Mac compatibility software. Which we did. It just keeps an eye on things and lets you know about software updates.

It's not the most exciting piece of software, but that said, it warms the heart to know that Apple owners are not being frozen out by Motorola in the way that they have by other manufacturers.