Motorola RAZR MAXX review: Power ranger

Full organizer suite with Office document editing

Like most of its droid siblings, the Motorola RAZR MAXX comes with a rich set of organizer features and Moto even threw in a version of Quickoffice that can edit documents too (on many phones, this is a paid upgrade).

Quickoffice is an excellent app that has support for viewing several file types - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF. It can also edit and create new .DOC, .XLS and .PPT files (2003, 2007 and 2010 versions are supported). You have plenty of formatting options, inserting images, Excel formulas and so on.

The printing functionality enabled by MotoPrint is integrated into Quickoffice, which brings the document handling experience quite close to desktop standards.

Quickoffice comes preinstalled • Editing a Word and an Excel document • PPT and PDF files

The calendar has four different types of view - agenda, daily, weekly and monthly. You can use the phone calendars or one of your online calendars to schedule events. You can also set multiple alarms to act as a reminder. The calendar integrates with the status bar and also offers pop-up notifications.

Calendar is social too

The calculator is nicely touch optimized - the buttons are big enough and easy to hit.

The Calculator • Some advanced functions are available

The RAZR MAXX features a standard-looking Alarms & timer app. You can set multiple alarms with different repeat times and alarm tones. The app does have an extra over the stock Clock app - a second tab with a timer. There's no stopwatch though. The old app offered cool custom watch faces here, but this one doesn't.

The Clock app • Setting an alarm • The Timer app

There's a file manager on board as well - it can browse both the internal 16GB of memory and the microSD card. Batch actions are supported and you can ZIP (with or without encryption) and unzip archived files. It's a bit annoying that you can't browse an archive, just unzip it. Anyway, there's support for browsing shared folders on the Wi-Fi network you're connected to and also explore computers running MotoCast.

File Manager

Evernote also comes preinstalled - a popular note taking tool that synchronizes your notes across various platforms. The app is free at the Android Play Store, but adding it shows just how much the Motorola RAZR MAXX is targeted at business users.

Evernote comes preinstalled (note: these are promo screenshots, not from the device)

Finally, there's a really clever app called Smart Actions. It lets you create automatic actions triggered by different conditions you set. You can have the phone do various things (e.g. disable background sync, change screen brightness, display a notification to remind you of something, etc.).

There are several sample actions that can be useful in certain scenarios but you can create your own from scratch too.

With Smart Actions you can automate a lot of things on you RAZR MAXX

It's not quite like having NFC, which lets you automate such things with tags. This could be a bit more flexible at times but isn't a replacement for NFC, which has other functions too.

Offline Google Maps

The Motorola RAZR MAXX comes with a GPS receiver, which took about a minute and a half to get satellite lock upon a cold start. You can use the A-GPS functionality to get near instantaneous locks. Alternatively, network positioning will do if you only need a rough idea of your location.

Google Maps is a standard part of the Android package and we've covered it many times before. It offers voice-guided navigation in certain countries and falls back to a list of instructions elsewhere.

3D buildings are shown for some of the bigger cities and you can use two-finger camera tilt and rotate to get a better view of the area.

Google Maps

Google Maps uses vector maps, which are very data efficient. The latest version has an easy to use interface for caching maps - you just choose "Make available offline from the menu" and pan/zoom around until the desired area is in view (there's an indicator showing how much storage caching that area will take). You can later view cached areas and delete ones you no longer need.

Note that there's a limit to the size of the area you can cache - you can't just make all of Europe available offline, not even a whole country. We managed to fit New York and some surrounding area before Maps told us the area is too big. Also, there's no address search in the cached maps and you can only cache map data in supported regions of the world.

Making an area of the map available for offline usage is very easy

You can plan routes, search for nearby POIs and go into the always cool Street View. The app will reroute you if you get off course, even without a data connection.

Play Store on ICS level

Now that the Motorola RAZR MAXX is running Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, it has access to the latest apps (like Chrome) and, with nearly 4GB worth of install space, you can download all the apps you want.

The Store is organized in a few scrollable tabs - categories, featured, top paid, top free, top grossing, top new paid, top new free and trending. The in-app section is very informative - a description, latest changes, number of downloads and comments with rating. There is usually a demo video and several screenshots for most apps too.

The Google Play Store

There are all kinds of apps in the Google Play Store and the most important ones are covered (file managers, navigation apps, document readers etc.).