Motorola RAZR i hands-on: First look

Synthetic benchmarks

Intel has managed to become the mobile chipset vendor to hit 2GHz with its latest Atom chipset. The frequency is impressive indeed and Intel even went on to say that it's not coming at the expense of power consumption. The chipset is built on a 32nm process, so maybe there's some truth to that.

Testing the 2GHz Atom

For usability, it's pretty good. The Motorola Razr i XT890 is quite responsive and it performs very well when it comes to web browsing, switching between apps, even if there's something going on in the background (e.g. an app being installed).

The processor doesn't benchmark too well though, even with the clock speed increase. Single-threaded performance in Benchmark Pi is nothing spectacular. The Linpack score is pretty good for a single-core processor and Quadrant puts the RAZR i very close to the Atrix HD.

Benchmark Pi

Lower is better

• Motorola DROID RAZR M
  264
• Motorola Atrix HD
  294
• HTC One S
  306
• HTC One X
  330
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  344
• Motorola RAZR MAXX
  402
• Motorola RAZR i
  534

Linpack

Higher is better

• HTC One S
  210
• Motorola DROID RAZR M
  188.9
• Motorola Atrix HD
  186.4
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  177.1
• HTC One X
  160.9
• Motorola RAZR i
  108.5
• Motorola RAZR MAXX
  51.2

Quadrant

Higher is better

• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  5952
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  5365
• Meizu MX 4-core
  5170
• Motorola DROID RAZR M
  5126
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  4814
• Motorola Atrix HD
  4178
• Motorola RAZR i
  4125

GPU benchmark

We also managed to run a quick NenaMark 2 test. Intel promised that they've increased the GPU speed by moving it to their 32nm process and there is indeed a small speed bump.

It's still an old PowerVR SGX540 GPU though, so it doesn't stack up very well against newer designs like Tegra 3's GPU, Mali-400 or the Adreno 225.

NenaMark 2

Higher is better

• Motorola DROID RAZR M
  61.1
• HTC One S
  60.5
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  58.8
• Motorola Atrix HD
  56.7
• HTC One X
  56.6
• Motorola RAZR i
  38.9
• Motorola RAZR MAXX
  36.9

Browser benchmarks

The JavaScript performance, however, is absolutely stunning. It's just about as fast as we've seen a mobile device perform on SunSpider, with only Note II beating it. We suspect the tables will turn when the Motorola RAZR i gets updated to Jelly Bean though (the JB browser is quite a bit faster than the ICS one). Even general browser performance is excellent as BrowserMark shows, the RAZR i lags behind only Samsung's quad-core designs.

SunSpider

Lower is better

• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  972
• Motorola RAZR i
  1043
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1447
• HTC One X
  1468
• Motorola Atrix HD
  1647
• HTC One S
  1708
• Motorola DROID RAZR M
  1861
• Motorola RAZR MAXX
  2136

BrowserMark

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  185034
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  169811
• HTC One X
  140270
• Motorola RAZR i
  129562
• Motorola DROID RAZR M
  113620
• Motorola Atrix HD
  107535
• HTC One S
  98435
• Motorola RAZR MAXX
  92653