Motorola DROID RAZR HD Full Review


Performance Summary and Conclusion

The Motorola DROID RAZR HD is an exceptional phone in its current price range of $199 on contract.  The RAZR HD easily has best in class build quality, with a sturdy, stylish and trim exterior that offers the sort of design quality rivaled only by devices from HTC and maybe Nokia's Lumia series.  Performance with the RAZR HD is about on par with virtually any high-end Android handset on the market today, with its dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 SoC offering responsive, silky-smooth performance, navigating around Motorola's lightly skinned version of Android 4.0.4.  Screen rendering with the web browser is fast, along with responsive multi-gesture reactions to pinch/zoom etc.
What's interesting is that though the RAZR HD is only backed with 1GB of system memory, the device never once felt sluggish or hesitant, especially compared and contrasted to experiences we've had with the Samsung Galaxy S III which sports 2GB of RAM. Again, performance and horsepower-wise, the RAZR HD feels balanced, nimble and powerful.

For us, the primary let-down of the RAZR HD is the inefficient use of its 4.7-inches of screen real estate.  If Motorola could only see clear to removing the on-screen Android buttons, moving them down to capacitive touch-enabled locations in the body of the phone, the RAZR HD would be a darn near perfect combination of beauty, brawn, rugged build quality and grace.  That one gripe aside, we really like the RAZR HD and feel it's a good value at is current price point, for those looking to tap a 4G LTE network for a completely satisfying mobile computing, social networking and communications experience.

  

  • Fast and responsive
  • Lightly skinned Android 4.0
  • Exceptionally high build quality
  • Durable
  • Great screen image quality
  • Inefficient use of screen real estate
  • Low screen DPI (user preference)

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