You can’t polish a turd/Motorola V3 Razr
In the words of my esteemed colleague: “You can’t polish a turd!”
These immortal words have been proven true in the case of the Motorola V3 Razr cellphone. It’s a great looking phone, but it still smells bad.
A month after I received the phone, the keypad broke and only the power button was left working. Now I’m a forgiving person, and I let the manufacturer do their best to correct their bad design, but when the exact same thing happens six months down the line – after the keypad has been replaced – then I make the assumption that it’s just a shit phone.
So I head back to Nashua and request a replacement phone, since this one is probably a dud, but they can’t replace it or swap for a better phone since it has to be sent back to get fixed. I point out that I don’t enjoy running around every few months to get a vital piece of business equipment fixed, so can they kindly shove the phone somewhere unpleasant and give me a refund. You’d think that when your company has ten or so contracts costing between R1000 and R2000 each then your service provider would be a little more helpful and jump to replace a bad phone so as not to taint a profitable client relationship, but the usual corporate BS of “we can’t authorize that” is like a brick wall to the staff there.
A long story short, I managed to get a R1500 refund on the Razr and upgraded to a Sony Ericsson K700i which I’m happy with so far.
If you’re thinking of getting a V3 Razr, think twice. It may look fantastic, but it’s all squishy and turd-like inside.
Pros:
- Looks good.
- Thin enough to fit in jean pockets comfortably
Cons:
- Slower than other phones in this range, especially for typing an SMS and it takes two seconds to answer a call after flipping it open.
- Flaky keypad broke every few months
- Image viewer wastes half the screen on controls. How hard could it be to add a full-screen view feature?
- SMSing is a pain, as it takes numerous keypresses to insert a full stop and the predictive text input is slow and stupid. Nokia and Sony Ericsson do this right, so why doesn’t Motorola just copy them?