Motorola RAZR i review

The new Motorola RAZR i has two key elements. First, it packs a fairly-large screen into a fairly-compact handset, and second it's the first big-brand handset to use an Intel chipset - and one with an all-time high 2.0GHz clock speed. Despite these impressive feats, it's not a high-end, flagship handset and is instead priced to compete with upper mid-range handsets such as the HTC One S.

FRAMED TO PERFECTION

Smartphones have been getting steadily bigger over the last couple of years. The new iPhone has extended its screen upwards, while Samsung and HTC's flagship models have both gone with super-sized screens. All of this is pushing at the boundaries of the human hand, so there's been a lot of competition not just to provide the biggest screen but to do it in the smallest possible package. Based on those terms, the new Motorola RAZR i is definitely a winner.

It really does feel like a smaller phone than its 4.3in screen would suggest

The 4.3in screen isn't up there with the Samsung Galaxy S III's 4.8in monster, but it's still a sizeable display and one that puts in on a par with previous Motorola RAZR models and the excellent HTC One S. What's impressive, though, is how Motorola have managed to squeeze this sizeable screen into such a small handset.

It's considerably smaller than its RAZR predecessor

The bezels down the side of the display are about 3mm across, and at 123x61x8.3mm it compares very well to the HTC One S at 131x65x7.8 mm. That's 8mm less long and 4mm less wide, for an already slender phone with an identically-sized display, and you can tell the difference both in your hand and in your pocket.

The slightly tapered shape makes it slide into your pocket easily, the exposed screws chime well with the RAZR brand's distinctly macho styling

One key difference between this handset and the One S (or again previous RAZRs) is that the touch-sensitive buttons below the display have been dropped in favour of onscreen versions. These can limit the amount of onscreen space you have, but they slide out the way for watching videos or viewing pictures.

The display itself is Super AMOLED with a 960x540 resolution, the same specs as the One S and previous RAZRs. Despite this we saw definite differences between the RAZR i and the RAZR - subtle changes in colour reproduction, but it also looked marginally sharper. As an AMOLED pentile display, it doesn't have a full RGB subpixel structure, which does make things look a little messy around high-contrast edges, in return though AMOLED provides fantastic contrast and power consumption advantages over LCD-based smartphones. All that said, we really like the display on the RAZR i, and for the price this is a good screen, though not a ground-breaking one.