Motorola RAZR i review

INTEL INSIDE

The Intel processor inside the Motorola RAZR i runs at an extremely impressive-sounding 2.0GHz. A significant step up from the 1.6GHz from the first Intel handset we saw, the Orange San Diego. It’s not official, but an Intel representative at the launch told us that it was the same x86-based Intel Atom Z2460 chipset as on the Orange handset.

Unusually for a high-end smartphone, the RAZRi only has a single-core, though this is balanced somewhat by Intel’s long-established Hyper Threading technology, which effectively creates two virtual cores on one physical processor. More importantly, and surprisingly, given the proliferation of dual- and quad-core processors, is how well Android runs on only a single core.

We didn’t detect any slowdown in the installed Android 4.04 when navigating the menus and even switching between applications quickly. In fact it felt snappier than its immediate competition. Further benchmarking, using Quadrant, did show up the lack of multiple cores; though in the RAZR i’s defence, such raw number-crunching, multi-core performance is rarely key to a smartphone.

Not the fastest handset in Quadrant, but in web browsing it’s out of this world

High clock speeds often equate to poor power efficiency, but that wasn’t the case with the RAZR i. Its sizeable 2,000mAh battery coped admirably, producing an excellent battery test score of nine hours and fifteen minutes – that’s for continuous video playback at half brightness. It’s a slightly better score than the One S, though tellingly the S3 (with its quad cores and bigger screen) lasted longer.

We weren’t worried about the 3D performance of the RAZR i, as we’d been impressed by the San Diego previously. Tests showed that it wasn’t quite up there with the best chipsets – such as the Galaxy S3’s Xynos, or Nvidia Tegra 3 – but there’s not much in it. A bigger problem is not every app works on Intel’s architecture, we struggled to find even one that didn’t in our list of installed apps – though the x86 codec for our usual video playback software (MX Player) was broken when we tested it.