Motorola RAZR maxx V6 review: HSDPA flip take two

Texting and emails

Motorola RAZR maxx V6 has the standard messaging menu, meaning Inbox for text and multimedia messages and a separate inbox for the emails. The SMS editor has iTap to assist the typing and counts down the characters before exceeding the 160 limit. It also shows the amount of separate messages that will be sent if you exceed 160 characters.

Message Centre • SMS editor

The Email application supports POP3, SMTP and IMAP4 protocols. It can also download attachments easily. You can set the phone to download the headers only or the entire emails.

Creating new email • setting up your email

Music is in the air

The phone supports MP3, AAC, AAC+ music formats and plays rather well music files. The player offers repeat and shuffle options, bass boost and spatial width control. It handles playlists effortlessly. The touch sensitive keys on the front of the phone are quite hard to use, as they do not react every time they are touched. Sometimes they even response without being touched or after a long delay.

Playing a song • in the background • music setup • choosing what to play

Besides that, the music player shows song progress on the external display if you decide to play the music in the background. The video player offers almost the same options as the music player and it can play the movies in fullscreen, meaning landscape mode. The Samsung Z560 can also play video in fullscreen but doesn't support landscape mode. On the other hand a landscape mode is not a much needed feature on a clamshell handset since it is uncomfortable to hold it sideways.

Showing the song on the external display • Playing a video • in landscape view • video options

There are 50 MB internal memory and a microSD memory card slot available so you can store your music without difficulty and access it at any time.

Camera

Motorola maxx V6 features a 2 megapixel camera with basic set of options. You can select the resolution and compression, switch the LED flash on/off (don't expect miracles) or use the self-portrait option. The camera lacks autofocus; anything closer than, say, 60 cm from the lens will be out of focus. The digital zoom works by cropping a portion of the photo.

Shooting with Motorola RAZR maxx

The quality of the photos is about average for a 2 megapixel camera. The HSDPA rival Samsung Z560 overall has a better camera mainly because of the autofocus and the wider dynamic range (we've got less overexposure from the Samsung). However, we noticed that during the testing we ended up with more "keepers" from the Motorola maxx, because we didn't have to rely on and wait for the slow autofocus. Please note, that the presented photo samples are losslessly rotated for your convenience.

Camera viewfinder • Zooming in and out • camera options

Sample camera photos

In video mode the camera captures video at QCIF (176 x 144 pixels) resolution in 3GP format. We find that resolution pretty low for today's standards so we won't be showing you any video samples.

The player offers repeat and shuffle options, bass boost and spatial width control. It handles playlists effortlessly. The touch sensitive keys on the front of the phone are quite hard to use, as they do not react every time they are touched.

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3.5G

Motorola RAZR maxx V6 has 3G connectivity and can handle video calls. When starting a video call, the VGA camera is used to capture your image and send it to the other side. You can see your image in a small window under the main window which shows the opposite side's image. But HSDPA means more than video calls. It supports data transfers up to 3.6 Mbps which means you can browse the web really fast. The competing Samsung Z560 supports downlink speeds of up to 1.8 Mbps but that's ok since not many mobile networks support the 3.6Mbps standard.

As it seems speed will be all that matters with HSDPA-handsets becoming more and more popular in and wide spread in 2007. So we decided to conduct a little speed challenge of our own. We set up a MP3 file online which was 4MB in size or exactly 4,263,772 bytes. Then we downloaded it using several handsets in order to compare download speeds. Here are the results:

UMTS & HSDPA speed test

If one looks at the download speeds which we have listed here, they may notice that the UMTS download speeds are closer to their theoretical maximum than the HSDPA speeds. A possible explanation might be that the bottleneck for HSDPA data transfers in the end will turn out to be the pure write speed of the device itself than any other thing. A possible reason for the lack of difference between the download speeds of the Samsung Z560 and Motorola RAZR maxx V6 is the network limitation at 1.8 Mbps.

The Motorola maxx V6 also has GPRS and EDGE both Class 10 support so when you are in a place with no 3G signal, you can always switch to slower GPRS or EDGE.

For short distance communication, Motorola have included Bluetooth and USB support. The Bluetooth supports the A2DP profile which means that you can listen to music on a stereo Bluetooth headphones. You can synchronize your phone with a PC seamlessly using USB or Bluetooth. You can also synchronize with a remote server using the MOTOSYNC application.

Connectivity options • Synchronization

Opera 8

This clamshell comes equipped with Opera 8 browser which can open most of the web pages out there. It handles Javascript and Flash and has zoom in and out features. Regrettably, there is no landscape mode, which is a pity considering the large display.

Checking out Google and GSMArena