One thing you won’t find? A battery door — in another concession to thinness, the battery is sealed in.
Display
Droid RAZR review: What you should know
While the RAZR is the first device to ever ship with a 4.3-inch qHD 960 x 540 Super AMOLED display, it’s not quite the achievement Motorola made it out to be at launch. First, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus features a higher-resolution 720p HD Super AMOLED display, and second, the RAZR’s screen looks pretty bad. Super AMOLED panels use the inferior PenTile pixel arrangement, and the RAZR’s 256dpi pixel density doesn’t hide it — in fact, it seems to make it worse. Not only are individual pixels readily apparent, but text looks jaggy, there’s red fringing around vertical lines, and images seem to de-res when scrolling in the browser.
Compared to Motorola’s excellent qHD LCD displays in devices like the Bionic and Droid X2 and Apple’s industry-leading iPhone 4 / 4S Retina Display, the RAZR is a major disappointment — and that’s before even taking into account AMOLED’s inherent love-it-or-hate-it hypersaturation and consistent off-axis blue color shift.
According to Motorola, choosing Super AMOLED helped make the RAZR thinner — AMOLED displays don’t need external backlights like traditional LCD displays. It’s just unfortunate Motorola had to sacrifice display quality as well.
Software
Motorola’s dropped the "Motoblur" and "Blur" branding for the skin it puts on its high-end smartphones, but this nameless evil is still to be feared. I actually quite liked the skin Motorola used on the Droid X2, which did little apart from tightening up some visual elements of Android and adding clear buttons to individual notifications, but things have gotten substantially worse with every subsequent Motorola device. The current version of Moto’s skin is overwrought, fussy, and confusing in many places, and while there are some redeeming elements, nothing about it is clean or inviting — it’s almost like the OS is screaming at you. Just watch the extraneous random "glow" animation that accompanies each homescreen transition, or the super-slow zoom in effect when you open the app list. Both are cute the first time, and then quickly irritating.
Some of the extra pieces are particularly silly: the quick contacts widget doesn’t let you jump down your contact list by letter, so you have to scroll endlessly to add specific contacts, Motorola’s app icons are just slightly larger than Google’s, so they don’t look properly aligned, and the photo gallery app is a mish-mash of controls and menus. It all feels like Motorola just can’t seem to help itself when it comes to cramming things into its skin; a little restraint would go a long way.
That said, Motorola has added some interesting pieces to the RAZR.
Smart Actions are likely the single best feature of the RAZR. The system constantly monitors the phone’s state and location and automatically adjust settings and performs tasks as things change. The possibilities range from the simple, like launching the music player when headphones are plugged in, to the complex, like shutting down Bluetooth and GPS when you get home to preserve battery life.
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