by Al Shield

Created on: January 15, 2009

Oh it looked so good fresh out of the box - Phone on one side, camera on the other - black and shiny with a neon chrome stripe right around, easy to use buttons and an innovative 3 button touch screen above the keypad. A touch on the heavier side but easy to slide into your pocket - it seemed like an ideal replacement for my failing Motorola V3X.

However as easy as this is to use (you'll have the basics figured within 10 minutes tops), there's a couple of flaws that seriously hamper this being one of the best phones around.

Firstly those touch screen buttons. Sure it's a novel thing on a phone (well not so much anymore with the Apple IPhone and it's like) but unless you have small fingers after a few minutes you'll start to get annoyed that you keep hitting them just by being in their vicinity. I've lost count of how many times the 'Do you want to cancel' message pops up when txting because my pinky happened to pass the button and it somehow registered an impact. Yet sometimes when you do intentionally hit the touch screen buttons, it takes a while for them to register 'Oh, NOW you meant to touch me? Well gimme a second...'. Which leads on to the next fatal flaw...
Lag. Very frustrating. It lags worse than an MX5 with a Massey Ferguson tractor turbo. Go fast with this thing and it suffers from a terminal case of brain freeze and slows down just short of a lock up. Not very handy when you want to do anything in a hurry. Sometimes it's in such a delay it's 1988 all over again and I'm back to being 8 years old. This I don't expect for such a pricey phone - I was warned about it, I shrugged it off but I should have listened - it can drive you insane at times.Finally for an unknown reason, mine likes to reset itself midway through the occasional phonecall. Which can be a fatal flaw when using it for business as you either have to wait for the person you were speaking with to call back or redail them yourself. After a while this becomes a costly excercise in frustration.
The sound quality is loud and clear, the internal aerial work well, visually the screen is sharp and aside from the battery slide, it's a very robust phone that won't fall to pieces if you drop it. Don't expect high speeds from the internet side of things and the camera half of the phone doesn't like low lighting conditions when taking pictures. Bluetooth setup takes some getting used to but there's plenty of game trials to play with it included.

It's a great looking phone but for the price, I expected so much more - until they fix it's speed, occasional mid phone call resets and twitchy touch screen, give me back my Motorola V3X Razr.

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