The best multimedia RAZR yet amazingly costs $50 less than its competitors. Sprint's RAZR2 V9m uses the new RAZR2's huge external screen to show dozens of channels of streaming TV and to let you navigate through your music. Though this super-capable handset could use a dose of CrystalTalk (Motorola's noise canceling technology) and, more importantly, better system stability, it's Sprint's leading phone right now.

Like the other RAZR2s, Sprint's V9m is a big, luxurious slab of metal and glass dominated by a huge 2 inch, 320 by 240 external screen. It's a hair thinner than AT&T's model, but at 4.1 by 2.1 by 0 .47 inches and 4.2 ounces, this handset will never pass for a "small" in anyone's book. The front is dominated by the best external screen to ever be placed on a flip phone. In fact, at 320 by 240 pixels and 65 thousand colors, it's higher-res than the main screen featured on most phones. A tiny, two-megapixel camera sits above that screen. Side buttons control volume and launch the camera and VoiceSignal's excellent voice dialing system, and virtual buttons on the big outside screen launch Sprint TV, the music player and the camera. I especially like that the phone vibrates gently when you press any of these controls. Below the volume buttons is a troublesome MicroUSB port, for charging, PC connectivity and headsets. By this I mean that microUSB headsets and cables can be very hard to track down for purchase. Sprint's default settings make it way too easy to activate the music and video players by holding the phone the wrong way. Fortunately, there's a somewhat-buried setting to enable a keyguard to stop this.

There's no denying that the Sprint's V9m is a very good voice phone. It hits the impressive maximum volume of a Sanyo model but without distorting at high volumes, and the speakerphone is loud enough for outdoor use. I got some volume wobble in the earpiece and scratchy transmissions on the other side of a conversation, which I could blame on Sprint's network as the Verizon and Alltel versions (same hardware, Verizon's network) didn't suffer from those faults. But ambient noise performance didn't blow me away the way it did on AT&T's RAZR2. There's none of Motorola's CrystalTalk noise adaptation software here, and a very noisy situation made voice transmissions choppy. Like all the RAZR2s, the Sprint RAZR2 works fine with Bluetooth mono and stereo headsets. Battery life is very good, at nearly five hours of talk time, and while reception isn't quite up to the level of older Sanyo phones with pull-out antennas, it easily matches any current phone with an internal antenna.

The flagship feature on this handset though is the more than 30 channels of SprintTV which can be displayed on the V9m's outside screen, along with the beefy built-in speaker that's loud enough to entertain you and your neighbors on any extended airport layover. I'd suggest using Bluetooth headphones instead. You can also fire up Sprint's very, very basic music player application on the outside screen, though the only way you can play your songs is by stepping through all of them, in sequence. Opening up the phone lets you buy tracks from Sprint's music store at a delightful 99 cents/song and navigate through your music, but navigation is downright painful if you have more than a few dozen songs on the phone – a pity for a device that supports 2 GB memory cards. The phone plays AAC and MP3, but not WMA files.

I did find a few minor flaws with the phone. While SprintTV is the best use of the external screen yet, the streaming video only takes up the top 2/3 of the screen, and there's no way to expand it to full-screen. Also, on the even larger internal screen, video still looks rather compressed. Of course this is a problem with every carrier's streaming video service. Still, I'm not sure why mobile videos can't all look as good as YouTube on the iPhone.

Open up the phone and you'll find more features. There's a real, if basic, Web browser from Obigo that can't handle Javascript or frames, but at least it isn't chained to WAP. Sprint's ubiquitous Handmark On Demand information app brings weather and news to the home screen. You can use the phone as a GPS navigator with the Telenav service, and hook it up to your PC as a modem (I couldn't test that feature, alas, for lack of drivers.) The only item missing is Sprint's sexy new Seven e-mail application, as seen on the LG Muziq; in fact, there's no built-in e-mail here at all.

Sprint's RAZR2 is also the only RAZR2 to welcome a full array of third-party Java applications, which would be great, if they worked. The free Flurry e-mail program works fine. But Opera Mini and the Nutsie music streaming program both crashed on the device, and there's no version of Yahoo! Go that runs properly yet. Sprint TV (a Java app) also crashed inelegantly on exit several times. Yet I'm not that worried since these are the kinds of errors that developers and carriers fix within the first few months after release, and I prefer Sprint's open approach by leaps and bounds over the locked-down systems other carriers have. A little more worrisome, if you're picky, is that the interface feels a bit laggy compared to the sprightlier Alltel RAZR2, and applications like the music player take several seconds to load.

The RAZR2's 2-megapixel camera is decidedly ho hum. It could be sharper, and it gave some of my photos a slight bluish cast. Low-light photos suffered from shutter-speed blur, and very bright areas in outdoor photos were washed out. The video mode captures 320 by 240 videos at 15 frames per second, of middling quality.

My previous Editor's Choice on Sprint, the Sanyo 8400, is getting quite long in the tooth and it isn't even sold any more. The Sanyo Katana DLX and LG Muziq are certainly solid midrange choices. But the RAZR2 brings a 'wow' factor to Sprint's line that those other phones lack, and follows this up with enough horsepower to deliver multimedia services. I have faith that Sprint and Motorola will work the stability and compatibility issues out here, so I'm giving the RAZR2 an Editor's Choice with my fingers crossed for luck. The RAZR2 for Sprint goes on sale August 22.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 4 hours 50 minutes
Jbenchmark 1: 11264
Jbenchmark 2: 483
Jbenchmark 3D HQ: 276
JBenchmark HD: 194 (6.5 fps)

Compare the Motorola RAZR2 V9m (Sprint) with several other mobile phones side by side.