Motorola Razr V review

It's almost unfair to judge the Razr V in today's mobile marketplace. Released in the middle of 2012, the handset has aged, and not in a good way.

Within months, Motorola had itself superceded the Razr V with the Razr M and Razr HD, both of which offered better screens, improved battery and 4G connectivity.

We Liked

The screens colours pop in a really nice way. Even though the 4.3-inch panel seems a little small and the resolution is nothing to get excited about, it reproduces nice, bright colours.

Speaker quality, both for media and phone calls, is great. Audio comes through loud and clear, which can be a real challenge for smartphones.

The operating system, while only Ice Cream Sandwich, is as close to vanilla as you can get. With the leaps and bounds Google has made to the software since Android 4.0, this is a good thing.

The kevlar coating, while not bulletproof or waterproof or anything-proof, does look nice and has a nice texture to it.

We disliked

The body is uncomfortable to hold. It could be the chunky bar across the top that ruins the aesthetics, or the slightly blocky corners. But either way, it's far from a comfortable device to hold in the hand. The power button is hard to push as well.

The camera is underwhelming, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily bad. More disappointing was the Optus bloatware filling up the paltry 2GB of usable internal storage.

Final Verdict

This is a pretty decent entry level smartphone. The catch is that it doesn't really have an entry level price point.

To be perfectly honest, it feels like a generational upgrade to the original Razr, which is exactly what it was. That's all well and good, but in a market that's filled with iconic handsets like the HTC One, the iPhone 5 and the Xperia Z, the Razr V just feels a little undercooked. Even cheap phones like the Kogan Agora 5-inch feel better on the spec-front.

It's partially understandable though - Motorola has been clearing its product lines out ever since Google took them over. The process will take time, and when it's done we're looking forward to something truly impressive from Moto.

Until then though, this isn't a phone we'd recommend buying. It's not a bad phone by any stretch of the imagination, it's just that there are much better phones on the market that cost about the same.