Motorola V3 Razr

A lot of firsts with this phone, non-Siemens, flip-phone, metallic, dual screen and it wasn't bought in Dubai!

It was a bad time to buy any phone, since there were new models coming out in a month or two from all the manufacturers I was considering. It was a toss up between a Samsung D500 and the Razr, and while the D500 is definitely more superior in terms of features, but decided to go with the razr since it was metallic and was available at around 30% lower thanks to an exchange offer.

I've been using the phone for a week now(3/12/2005), and while the phone is pretty good overall 19.5 hours of data usage and 6 hours of talk time in 5 recharges in 7 days, with Bluetooth turned on all the time.(Lasted 48 hours while in Bangalore since I don't use GPRS much when I'm not roaming) It does have some shortcomings.

Negatives

The phonebook is awful, even my c25 from 6 years ago had a more functional phonebook. It shows each number for a contact as a seperate entry, and you can only jump to an entry starting with the first letter (typing A-S will take you to entries starting with S and not As) It is possible to group numbers based on the name field but in that mode there is no indication that there are other numbers for the contact.

I'm currently using the phonebook in search mode where I'm having to hit the keypad around 2-4 times more than necessary to get to a number. Luckily the phone allows for a java based addressbook if I'm not comfortable with the phonebook in a few weeks, I'll probably create a Siemens like phonebook midlet and use it instead of the built-in phonebook

It doesn't have a seperate list for missed calls, and doesn't have a counter for the number for missed calls from each number.

All those people that crib about linux applications having non-standard unintuitive menus should take a look at this product of professional development. Where brightness/displaytimeout etc come under "Initial Setup" along with date/time, DTMF settings and the Reset options! And I thought clicking "Start" to "shutdown" was bad.

It comes with a 165 page manual that is wasted in explaining howto make an receive calls, while a lot of menu options are left totally unexplained

Positives

Awesome keypad, fully metallic and is a delight to use

Java support allows me to SSH into my machine at home and check mail. The ability to do this on the phone itself without having to open/lug around my laptop more than makes up for all the shortcomings.

Has a much larger display than non-flip phones, which probably gives me a handful of more characters on midpSSH's VT320 display.

The top level menus are customisable, they can be shifted around for easy access. Which makes the bad menulayout a bit usable. But not very much better.

MP3 ringtones are the best, allows for really clever ringtones

USB charging, I just need to plug the phone into my iBook and it starts charging.

Siemens features I miss most

Ability to scroll through menus using the numeric keypad, one keypress per menu/submenu and a max of 4 key presses to get to any option you want. 5-6 keystrokes to get past each menu is ridiculous.

Call Screening, ability to prevent random people from disturbing my sleep is one feature I used quite a bit, While it is possible to achieve pretty much the same result by changing/assiging ringtones to particular groups in the phonebook. It's non-trivial.

While 6.8MB of storage is a little cramped considering the rest of the phones in the market, but since I've managed for the past 2 years with <1MB of storage I don't think I'm going to find it constricting , I've loaded all the ringtones/wallpapers/midlets that I'll need and there's still 6MB left. And I tend to stick with a layout/theme once I get used to it, I still use a wallpaper on my desktop from 2002!

The biggest problem I faced was with syncing/exporting my old phonebook to the Razr, Siemens used to sort the phonebook based on the "last name" field, which doesn't make much sense to me, so I ended up storing all my contacts with the Full Name in the Last Name field, the Razr uses a single field for the name, and very intelligently got the field filled with First Name + Space + Last Name, and since all my First Name fields were blank, I had nearly 99% of my contacts stored with a space as their first character, and thanks to the crappy phone book I couldn't "jump" to any of the contacts directly. It took me a whole day to figure out what was happening been using the "search" mode since.