Motorola RAZR V3m Gray (Sprint)

by Motorola

Product Features

• Watch On-demand Sprint TV or Listen To Streaming Music With Sprint Music Store
• Less Thank 1/2-inch Thick Shell With Feather-touch Precision Crafted Keypad
• Bluetooth Wireless Technology
• Built-in Music Player
• Removable, Expandable Memory Card Slot

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Boasting support for Sprint PCS Wireless' exclusive Power Vision mobile web content service, the RAZR V3m is the best RAZR yet offered from Sprint Wireless. The V3m also features a microSD/TransFlash memory card slot, a 1.3 megapixel camera, and more.

Slim and powerful, the RAZR V3m supports Sprint PCS' Power Vision mobile broadband services. See it in action (requires Flash).

Design
The RAZR V3m's design takes the standard clamshell form factor to the next level with an impressive, fully-anodized aluminum construction. A large 176 x 220 color display with 65,000 colors dominates the inside of the top cover. The outside cover of the handset sports a supplementary 96 x 80 full-color display that can display caller ID pictures, time, call information, battery and signal strength, and more. The 1.3 megapixel camera lens is housed above this display. Up/down buttons are placed on the left side for volume control.

Most of the phone's features and on-screen menus are controlled by a five-way center button on the handset's backlit control pad, which is precision cut from a single sheet of nickel-plated copper alloy. A charging port and USB data cable port is placed on the bottom of the phone. The RAZR V3m also features 30 MB of embedded memory for storing pictures, videos and downloaded PCS Vision content, and you can expand your storage space with the phone's microSD/TransFlash memory card slot. Note that the phone does not have a 2.5mm headset jack, but a headset adapter is included in the box.

Calling Features
The RAZR V3m's internal phone book can hold up to 1000 contacts while the phone's picture ID system allows you to assign pictures to your most common callers. It also supports polyphonic ringtones as well as MP3 ringers, allowing you to use portions of your favorite songs to alert you to incoming calls. A number of ringtones come preloaded on the phone and more ringtones can be downloaded from Sprint's PCS Power Vision service. For times when you want to be discreet, there's a vibrating alert. A built-in speakerphone makes it easy to talk without having the phone to your ear while voice activated dialing makes calling your friends, family and associates as easy as saying their names. Speaker-independent technology allows any speaker to dial numbers with the voice dialing system. And because the RAZR V3m is Bluetooth enabled, wireless headsets can be configured with the phone for total handsfree operation.

Enjoy streaming video from CNN, Fox, The Weather Channel, NFL Mobile, and more.

Messaging, Internet, and Tools
The RAZR V3m is a messaging and wireless Internet powerhouse. Support is built in for sending and receiving pictures, text, graphics, sound and video via messages. When used in combination with the phone's built-in still and video camera, MMS opens up a whole new world of messaging fun (Sprint PCS text messaging charges apply). There's also a built-in web browser for downloads and mobile web browsing. You can trade stocks online, compare prices while shopping, access flight information, get movie listings and find directions to the theater. iTap text entry, which is a technology that makes it easier for people to enter words and text on handsets, is built into the unit--a plus for mobile email and text messaging users.

With support for the EV-DO high-speed data standard, the RAZR V3m is fully compatible with Sprint's Power Vision service. With Power Vision, you can download and stream high-quality video, straight onto your phone. Enjoy full-color video clips or live TV of the latest news, sports, and entertainment from brands you know, like CNN, Fox, The Weather Channel, NFL Mobile, and more. Power Vision also serves as a portal for enhanced games. Graphically-enhanced games for one or multiple players provide hours of entertainment.

Sprint's music service is another EV-DO-powered service that makes the V3m all the more desirable. With the Sprint Music Store, your phone is a music player, letting you buy, download, and then jam out wherever you are with new songs or old favorites. Save your songs to a memory card with a capacity that's right for you. You can even pause to take a call without missing a beat.

A number of handy software tools are bundled with the RAZR V3m including a voice memo recorder, a calculator with currency converter, a calendar and an alarm clock. The phone supports the SyncML PC synchronization standard, which can be used with Motorola's Mobile Phone Tools PC application to manage and synchronize contacts, calendar and other data with your PC. The RAZR V3m also supports Telenav GPS Navigator, which allows you to enjoy audible and visual turn by turn directions to any address (subscription required; 15 day trial included).

Imaging and Entertainment
The RAZR V3m's 1.3 megapixel camera bridges the gap between phones and quality digital cameras. The camera is also designed to capture video, and there are night and self-timer functions. Embedded animated screensavers and full screen wallpapers are built-in so you can set up the RAZR V3m to suit your tastes. The RAZR V3m supports 3D games, as well as other 2D-based games.

Vital Statistics
The Motorola RAZR V3m weighs 3.49 ounces and measures 3.90 x 2.10 x .57 inches. Its lithium-ion battery is rated at up to 3.33 hours of digital talk time, and up to 325 hours of digital standby time. It runs on the CDMA 850/CDMA 1900 frequencies. The phone comes with a one year limited warranty.

Product Description

The Motorola RAZR V3m offers the ultimate combination of brains, beauty and best of all - your favorite tunes! Motorola’s thinnest multimedia phone for the CDMA network, the RAZR V3m is a beauty captured in refined metal housing and a sculpted clamshell shape, accompanied by a sophisticated set of multimedia functions. Offering a large color screen and EVDO technology, the Motorola RAZR V3m is the ideal way to keep connected and entertained on the move – complete with integrated music player*, Over the Air (OTA) music downloading* and up to 1GB of removable memory. Fusing the best in multimedia, design and power, the Motorola RAZR V3m is the ultimate blend of style and function.

Product Details

• Item Weight: 3.5 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• ASIN: B000JY1DR6
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #19 in Cell Phones & Accessories (See Top 100 in Cell Phones & Accessories)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Pretty face. That's about it., January 15, 2007

By 

John Faughnan "John G Faughnan" (St. Paul, MN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Motorola RAZR V3m Gray (Sprint)

Features

* Very light and slender, good build quality. This phone is a classic example of marrying reasonably good hardware to really bad software.
* Images are stored on an mini-SD card that can be read on any computer - if you can remove it. The card is a bit inaccessible. Don't lose the adapter that allows it to be read in an SD reader.
* Compact and well made quasi-USB charger. It's the same charger for Motorola bluetooth headset.
* Mini-USB connector for charge and data. It will charge with a mini-USB data cable connection if the phone's USB drivers have been installed. Otherwise you will get an "unable to charge" message. This drove me nuts as its very poorly documented. Sprint's web site has an obscure link in the support section for software downloads, if you specify XP as the OS you can find the Motorola Sprint PCS Connection Manager. Installing this introduces several USB drivers, enables charging via the computer port, provides some diagnostic software utilities, and lets the phone act as a modem! I haven't tested this to see if will work in Parallels for OS X. Motorola doesn't provide anything for OS X, but a generous Mac developer has.
* Flip phone with external clock and number information.
* Runs Google's very impressive Gmail client. Ignore the "possibly not supported" install warning, it works.
* Somewhat to my surprise, I can browse this phone using the os x bluetooth browser and extract images that way. I can also drag and drop MP3s into the music file and play them.

Issues

* quasi-USB chargers! Argggh. Appearances are deceptive. The cable is mini-USB, but the output is 5V and 550mA. The USB standards is 5V and 500 mA. Those 50 mA seem to matter. In any event I get "unable to charge" messages when I use an external USB charger. (See this thread and the footnotes below for more details [1]). Based on the seemingly authoritative post [1] it might be safe to use this charger with standard USB devices.)

* you can't search the address book. Really. Yes, you can match on the first few letters of a first name, but that's so feeble I don't consider it search. It works for 20 contacts, it fails for for 500. You can't search on the last name, the city, etc.

You can create "groups" and assign contacts to groups that are used to filter views, but I half-suspect there's no "all" view. You can do a "voice lookup", but, of course, names are not phonetic. I was able to get the voice lookup to work if I modulated my voice carefully, raised my pitch, spoke in a quiet room, used the first and last name, and pronounced the names phonetically rather than as spoken. Then I ran into the voice look phone number bug. If a contact has more than one number, you are supposed to say "mobile 1" or "work 1" to dial the right number. There are only 3 or 4 word options, so recognition should be trivial here. Wrong. You really need to use the keyboard input at this point.

* extremely annoying juvenile ring tones If you want something geriatric, you pay for it. Or choose a beep. Or record something as a voice message and save it as a ring tone. (Probably the secret here is to use the USB/minijack audio adapter and a dual minijack connector to connect directly to the output from a computer audio output and record that way.)

* no iSync support. There is an effective hack however - I can sync contacts, calendar items, and alarms. I suspect iSync will lose the "group" assignments however.

* no input for a 2.5mm jack - need Bluetooth, proprietary headset, or a $6 USB to 2.5mm adapter which is annoying to find. Dumb.

* address book is limited to about 500 entries and 2,500 numbers/emails. That's good, because the contacts functionality is SO bad that you probably only WANT 10 numbers.

* You can't use it as an external "modem" to connect a computer to the net -- OUT OF THE BOX. You need to know to locate and download Sprint/Motorola's free PCS Connection Manager software. XP only. I haven't been able to get it to work yet, but I've only tried for a few minutes.

* Using Spring 3G services drains the battery in no time. The story that the iPhone uses EDGE because of power issues is more credible to me now.

* It's very slow to hang-up. This is a surprise, I don't know why.

* mini-SD card is stored beneath battery -- essentially not removable

* weak text input by default -- the default is to disable predictive text entry from the 3 letter/key cycle entry. You can actually enable predictive text with the kb entry, but it's an obscure configuration option and it doesn't work everywhere.

* Sprint has loaded the most prized UI locations with junk, while hiding the calendar, alarm clock, voice recorder and calculator in "Tools". However, you can change the key assignments to put Tools up front.

* the games are all very limited demos. Delete them all.

* The micro-SD card is about the size of a fingernail, and not much thicker. Impressive. Push the battery downwards to lift it out. It's not obvious where the SD card goes; lay it on the metallic surface near the arrow and gently press it in.

* The "web" is a "walled garden" -- all sprint, junk, and third rate portals. (AOL? Puhlease.) Way down the 'options' menu is a 'go to url' option. I was able to navigate to Google and install the superb Gmail app on this phone. There's an obscure preferences option to change the home page and a button to revert to original. I changed to Google Mobile of course, but I kept the original as a bookmark.

* If you turn off bluetooth power, then turn it on again, you will need to power cycle the phone before it will be reachable by bluetooth.

* I enabled the 'track location' option for third parties, but so far Google doesn't seem to have picked this up. I wonder if Sprint is charging a large amount for this data. I don't know if enabling the $6/month GPS option does anything useful.

* The corresponding Motorola bluetooth headset dials the last number called if you press the single large external button. This happens very often -- by accident! I'm constantly dialing people who think I'm making obscene phone calls. The only way to prevent this is to turn off the Motorola bluetooth headset -- but the UI for that is very bad. The headset and phone together are so bad they're almost good in a hideously bad sort of way.

Reconfiguration (mostly making this a Google phone)

* Change screen settings so top is messages, left is tools, right is "content" and down is contacts
.
* Change web home page to Google Mobile and login to your personal Google HomePage. Add widgets to that Home Page that will work well with the phone. (Now I understand why these widgets are so fashionable ... duhhhh.)

* Install Google Maps and Gmail reader from Google Mobile.

* Learn to use Google SMS to request location specific information

* Configure Google apps with the locations you want (I have to learn if these can be configured via computer).

* Turn of auto-guess with the non-predictive text entry

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good phone, November 29, 2006

By 

JTS (Harford, CT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Motorola RAZR V3m Gray (Sprint)

I purchased this phone at a local Sprint store about 3 weeks ago. It was a good thing that Sprint decided to offer the Motorola phones because before that you had to sign up with Cingular or Verizon in order to get a Razr and I was just about to switch plans when I found out that Sprint started offering Razr's.

The obvious good points of the phone are that its very stylish and ultra thin and very light....you can hardly feel it in your pocket. There are also a lot of good features like speaker phone, camera, video, memory add-on slot (the phone comes with an extra memory card but you can purchase up to 2GB of additional memory), Bluetooth works seamlessly. The screen is nice and big. Overall, the phone looks great.

However, like any product there are some drawbacks to this phone. Relatively speaking they are minor issues. The first is that the camera button on the side of the phone is a bit loose and so when you move or shake the camera you can hear it rattling. When I first heard it, I thought there was a loose part inside the phone but quickly found out it was the button. Its not loud but its definitely noticeable. I went back to the store and checked the demo model and it had the same problem...the rep also went and took out a brand new phone, same model and it had the same loose button issue. So it didn't appear to be an isolated problem. The second drawback is that the volume buttons are on the left side of the phone (when its open) and the camera button is on the right side. So whenever I tried to adjust the volume with my right hand I would inadvertently press the camera button with my thumb. Not a great layout design but you eventually learn to work around it.

Other than those minor issues, the phone is very functional...and I'm happy with it just be sure to get all the discounts that you can on it because its definitely not worth spending more than say $50 for it.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nice, November 29, 2006

By 

S. Somashekhar (Overland Park, KS) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Motorola RAZR V3m Gray (Sprint)

I have been using this phone for a few weeks now and I am happy with it.

Pros:
It looks elegant, has clear voice and is gentle on the battery. It takes a micro SD card and comes with a media player to play mp3. The volume on the phone is pretty good.

Cons: It is hard to pull out the micro SD card and stick it back in as it is lodged in an impossible location. This will be a problem if you intend to swap out or edit cards frequently. This phone does not have the standard 3.5mm output for audio. Instead, it provides a mini-usb jack for audio which also doubles as the charging port. What this means is, you cannot charge the phone and listen to music simultanously unless you have a wireless headset. You also cannot charge the phone while streaming music through a FM Transmitter.