The Motorola Droid RAZR is the most gorgeous Android phone yet, and it definitely lives up to its name. I spent some time playing with the phone and talking to Motorola's engineers about how they got it to be so thin.
The Droid RAZR is one of those phones that feels even better in the hand than it does in pictures. Yes, it's ridiculously thin at 0.28 inches, smooth, and its material textures are a bit strange. My fingers couldn't quite place the feeling of the Kevlar back panel. It feels like plastic, but a little silkier. The 960-by-540, blessedly not-PenTile-format screen is an absolute stunner. It uses Samsung Super AMOLED Plus technology, Motorola said, but it's higher-res than any Samsung phone we've seen so far. The colors looked almost painted on.
This is a big phone, that's for sure, but that's the case with all 4.3-inch-display phones. There's also a considerable bezel around the screen, something Motorola's designers said they were working on reducing in future models. But it's still very handle-able, just because it's so darn thin.
The phone has the usual complement of ports, The top edge has a bulge for the 8-megapixel camera, so that's where Motorola also stuck the USB, HDMI, and headset jacks. On the side, there's a little door revealing the LTE SIM and MicroSD memory card slots. I couldn't find any way to remove the 1,800 mAh battery.
The phone runs a Moto-rized version of Android 2.3.5, with Motorola's social-networking widgets, a new power manager, and a bunch of extra apps. Stock Android fans won't be impressed, but everything ran apparently smoothly. To tell the truth, I kept stopping to go "ooh, pretty" about the screen. Madden 2012, for instance, was show-stoppingly beautiful. This screen is going to sell a lot of phones.
How's It So Thin?
The Droid RAZR uses a standard 1.2GHz dual-core TI OMAP4 (correction: I was earlier misinformed that it was Qualcomm) processor with separate CDMA and LTE modems, not the single-chip Qualcomm 8960 solution that's coming next year. The need to include a separate LTE chip has been cited by several manufacturers as why they can't get their phones razor-thin yet. So how did Motorola do it?
The company pared away layers and pieces that other phones take for granted, Motorola designers told me. For instance: most phones with removable batteries have a lining around the battery cavity. Not so with the Droid RAZR. Other phones, for instance the iPhone 4S, have their antennas perpendicular to the body of the phone. The Droid RAZR's antennas lie flat.
Using a dual-layer Samsung Super AMOLED Plus display helped save thickness over both LCD displays (because of the lack of a backlight) and standard Super AMOLED (because of a reduced number of process layers.)
The total re-engineering of internal design in the Droid RAZR reminds me a lot of the original RAZR, which at the time of its launch was also a radical experiment in materials design. And like with the original RAZR, we may see the Droid RAZR's advances coming to a family of phones, the designers said. I asked about flip phones; they parried back with "folding phones" and phones that, in some way, start out smaller and become larger. A physically smaller, but still slab-shaped Droid RAZR variant may also be possible.
Droid RAZR With a Side of Ice Cream?
The Droid RAZR comes at a strange time, and in a strange place. It wipes away the Droid Bionic, Motorola's excellent smartphone that the company released just a few weeks ago, but it comes just a few hours before Google—Motorola's parent company—announces Ice Cream Sandwich, the new version of the Android OS, in Hong Kong.
As if to cement Google's support, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt was sitting near me at the launch. But he didn't get up and didn't say a word.
Motorola spokeswoman Juli Burda said the company had nothing to say about Ice Cream Sandwich. Ditto for Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Brenda Raney. But we'll see if they change their tunes tomorrow.
The Motorola Droid RAZR goes on pre-sale on Oct. 27 for $299 with a two-year contract.