Motorola RAZR hands-on: First look

User interface

We've prepared a quick hands-on video to demonstrate the Motorola RAZR user interface. Motorola have added a few custom touches to the Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread and they seem to be working well from what we can tell so far - adding extra functionality (like lock screen camera launch) without getting in the way.

About 30 seconds into the video one of the coolest home-baked additions to the Motorola RAZR interface appears. Functionality similar to that of the Smart actions has been available through various third-party apps for some time now but Motorola is the first to actually bake it in the UI.

This is basically a clever way to manage your phone based on its location, battery status, the time of the day and whatnot. For example you can make your phone go to vibrate automatically whenever you are at home and it's past 11 PM. Or activate its Wi-Fi whenever you enter your office.

There are many presets available, but creating actions of your own isn't hard at all. Multiple triggers can be added and all must be in effect for smart action to execute.

The cool feature will be brought to other devices as well in the near future, but Motorola provided no exact time frame for that.

The other cool new feature of the Motorola RAZR is the MotoCast media server that you can run from your desktop PC or Mac. You can then stream multimedia content to your phone through both 3G and Wi-Fi networks and if you want you can even download some of it to the phone for offline usage. It's a great way to keep all your videos, images and music tracks available without wasting too much storage.

MotoCast even lets you access the files on your computer and allows you to get documents over-the-air, as long as you have any type of a working data connection.

All in all we are really pleased with the Motorola RAZR performance. The general interface browsing is smooth as silk and we even managed to get a 720p Flash video to play on this one (though 1080p was beyond its capabilities). Here comes the video proof of that.

First impressions

We left the Motorola RAZR feeling quite positive about its market prospects. The slim and powerful smartphone is exactly what the company needs to bring back the glory of the old days and while the RAZR alone will hardly make it the world's number 1 phone maker, it's certainly a huge step forward.

Or so it appears, as we'd need to spend some more time with it before we can give a final verdict. Still, the potential is all there and it will be a real pity if the Motorola RAZR doesn't live up to it. The innovative build materials, the really impressive screen and the super-slim body, without sacrificing anything in terms of performance is too great a package to be wasted. Here's hoping Motorola will get the rest of it right, too.