Motorola RAZR V3i Review / Complaint List

Foreword

The V3x is similar, slightly bigger and with a 2M camera and 240x320 display.

Sadly, the V3i didn't live up to expectations. It had so much potential, and it fell short, mostly because of poor software. It's clear that the V3i software is just the V3 software with some crappy MP3 player slapped on (paying off Apple for the "iTunes" label). And furthermore, the V3 software is just some update of some generic Motorola phone software, probably originally developed when cell phones weighed 30 pounds and ran on kerosene.

It's still a nifty phone, it's just frustrating to use in many instances, and people often ask me *why* I find my V3i not so perfect and I tell them the list is too long to enumerate.

I realized that with enough determination that wouldn't be true, and to demonstrate, I shall hereby enumerate the failings of the RAZR V3i. Perhaps this venting will help me emotionally heal enough to come to terms with using this completely handicapped phone.

Hardware

But that's the only hardware issue - the rest is all software, and should be patchable!

Connectivity

In fact, remember how it has "iTunes" software? It doesn't connect to iTunes on a Macintosh. It's like Motorola is playing a big joke on us.

Update: Bluetooth finally syncs with OSX 10.4.7

General Interface

Unfortunately, nobody mentioned this to Motorola.

• The number keys pretty much do nothing except dial and type. The rest of the time they are dead. An example of when they would be particularly useful is in menus - I should be able to access the 4th menu item by pressing 4. Instead, pressing 4 in a menu will only give me the satisfaction of having pressed 4. It does nothing to the phone. And I should be able to access the home menu grid by using the number grid. Shortcuts can alleviate this, but then I've used up all my shortcuts.
• Shortcuts, btw, are nice, but they are flaky. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't - I think it's a timing issue, but I can't figure out the magic formula and there's no setting for it.
• One good point, the home menu customization is great. Thanks for that.
• The phone has no timezone capabilities, nor can it auto set your time. I guess travellers need to get a more sophisticated phone than this.
• Speaking of setting the time, it's hidden in the "Initial Setup" menu for some strange reason. I guess they really don't want you travelling with this phone.

"iTunes"

The mp3 player on the RAZR V3i looks nothing like iTunes and is, frankly, awful.

Hence, for the rest of this article I will hereby refer to the player as "xTunes" instead of "iTunes," since "xTunes" sounds mysterious, and the interface to "xTunes" is exactly that.

• Everytime you start xTunes it runs through "Updating Music Database." I have about 100 songs on my V3i, and it takes about a minute. Have they never heard of checking file timestamps? I know the phone O.S. can handle timestamps, seeing as how this causes a Java bug (mentioned in "Java" section below). Update: I've put 400 songs on my card now, and xTunes won't even start anymore because it never finishes updating the music directory.
• There's no way to seek in a song. Seriously. You just can't. I'm not making this up.
• It doesn't save any options. It should save all the options as well as the current song, play state, song location, etc.. Instead, everytime I start up I have to turn on the shuffle option (default is OFF for some reason?!) pick a random song and hit play.
• There's no search function. You can't even type song/album/artist names.
• "Options" doesn't show up on the first page, the "Options" button is dead.
• The two other buttons on the side should do something, like song skip and pause, especially when the case is closed.
• When I think of all the controls I want to have over my mp3 player, it's amazing that all the keypad keys do nothing!
• Because it's Java based, it sucks battery life (and requires that no other Java apps are running). Why is this necessary? Especially considering how rudimentary xTunes is, and considering that mp3s can be played directly on the phone without xTunes, why Java?
• I'm told that some xTunes phones are limited to 50 songs and some are limited to 100. Apart from this random lottery, why is there any limit (apart from memory space) to how many songs you can store?
• Some kbps settings don't seem to work. More investigation needed.

Selection Issues

• Lists have no sorting capabilities. Add ringtones and they will get inserted haphazhardly into the list. Just try to find that Muppets ringtone you added 6 months ago.
• There should be a search feature, or at least a "type the first few letters" feature. The only list that has anything like this is the phonebook, though it's limited to just the first letter.

Java

• It can't seem to run many public domain apps that are available, though I must confess that might not be Motorola's fault.
• It sucks battery life.
• Java checks to see if your timestamps on your apps have changed, and if so, then it won't let you run them. This isn't particularly useful, and it makes it slightly more complicated to backup your phone state to computer.
• Installing apps from memory is convoluted at best.
• It's also not as fast as a PDA phone, but what'ya expect?

Profiles ("Ring Styles")

• When the case is closed you can change the profile, but for some reason you hit either up or down to go into "profile changing mode" and then you use the select button to scroll only forward through profiles to find the right one.
  Golly, I have an idea, why not make it so you use the select button to go into "profile changing mode" and use up/down to scroll up or down through the profiles. I can't count the number of times I've tried scrolling in one direction and passed the profile I wanted, only to have to scroll through all the profiles again to find it.
• The phone inconsistently changes profiles when I plug it into the charger. There should be a setting to control how and if this happens.
• Choosing a new ringer should start the ringer select at the current ringer, not at the top of the whole list. This is another example of "Selection Issues"

Messages

• The auto-cleanup feature is broken. It does nothing.
• The phone claims it's out of memory when it has about 50 messages, regardless of how much memory the phone may have leftover. It then starts throwing away any attempts to type new messages (after you've typed them of course, because we all know that first drafts are for losers).
• Speaking of memory, I've got half a gig card in there, why can't I select that as my message repository? I should be able to keep every message I've ever sent or received, and back them up to my computer.
• When sending a message, I shouldn't have to select the recipient, check them, and then hit send. The "send" button should check the current selection instead of giving me an error.
• When choosing a number to send messages to, the V3i treats each contact number as a different option (this is what the normal phonebook default is, for reasons I can't understand). Unlike the phonebook, you can't turn it off, which means you have to run through people's home phone, office phone, and even fax. You should be able to compress to one contact per line (like they do for the phonebook) or in the very least have an option to only look at cell numbers, since most other numbers usually don't accept SMS.

Media

• Can you say "full screen"? Is this an unreasonable feature request?
• It doesn't save video/sound position. I can store a number of full length movies on my card, but let's hope I don't have to leave the player until I'm done watching.
• Speaking of, this thing needs more play control. You can "seek" only by holding down the arrow keys (which otherwise "skip") and yet the number keypad again does NOTHING. And how about an option to type in a time to jump to. It wouldn't help much, though, since the player doesn't tell you what time you're currently at!
• You can't hide the player controls. If you're watching a video, those ugly controls are going to take up the bottom THIRD of the screen unless you have a piece of electrical tape handy.
• Speaking of the player controls, what if you could hide those and rotate the video and then scale it up to fit - it would be like having a 25% magically bigger screen, no extra cost!
• As an aside, it would be nice to have a USB adapter with video out.
• How about more zoom options than Fit, 50%, 75% and 100%?
• The camera should be easy to switch between photo/video.
• Go to "Videos setup" and set "Video length" to "Maximum." Start recording a video. Don't stop. Notice that, with 1G of memory (over 16 hours of video), the recorder stops at just under a minute. After much research I discovered that Motorola added this seemingly arbitrary restriction because the phone will actually explode once it records a minute straight of video, killing everyone in a 30 foot radius. Thank you for protecting us, Motorola.
• It would be nice to be able to play scaled 320x240 3GP video.
• The most wonderful menu shortcut I could imagine, would be for the audio player "Categories" menu item. Oh, wait - not allowed.
• Forget the possibility of a "random" shuffle play feature for the audio player, this thing doesn't even have sequential playing. That's right, when a song is over, it plays the same song again. As far as I can tell, this is yet more of the Motorola "Hate-Your-Phone-Interface" development group.

Browser

And while we're at it, why can't I redefine that browser button? Right now I have one key out of my limited set of keys that I never use. It would be dandy if I could launch Opera with that.

Phonebook

• As mentioned, the phonebook fails in the "Selection Issues" category.
• I should be able to attach a photo to all of a person's contacts without having to do it one at a time.
• When someone calls that has a photo, this photo should show up larger on both displays.
• There should be an available option for applying memory card photos to the phonebook with an explanatory error, instead of a useless explanatory alert when you try to apply phone memory photos.

Voice Records

• Why regularly beep over the recordings? Can't this be a setting?
• Why can't I save (or even MOVE) voice recordings to the memory card?
• Voice records have their own notion of memory space. You will run out of voice recording space after a minute or two even though there may be many MB left on your phone.
• Getting voice records off the phone is a feat comparable to killing a rabid clown, and is about as enjoyable. This can only be done by buying a USB->headphone adaptor (and mind you, this needs to be the OEM Motorola one that costs $20, the cheap ones on ebay don't seem to work) and then use a male-male adaptor to plug into the microphone port on a computer, then use recording software and play back the file. It's like we're back in the 90's. At least it doesn't require one of those suction-cup microphones.

Miscellany

• Alarms: It has multiple alarm capabilities. Great. But it's clear that you'll be editing alarms more often than creating new alarms, yet the first menu item for a selected alarm is "New" followed by "Edit." More unnecessary key pushes.
• Incoming Calls: The buttons on the outside can only turn the ringer off, you can't reject them, which means you can't open your phone to use it until they've rung themselves to voicemail.
• Battery Meter: lies like a dead dog. It pretty much claims that it's either full or empty. There's a middle state that it stays in for about thirty seconds, right before it starts beeping all the time to let you know the battery is low.

And yes, I realize that many of these problems can be hacked.

For more info, see:

• Howto mod a motorola phone
• Mapping for mod edit addresses
• Motorola modding forum
• Another motorola modding forum