We take the curvy new flip for a spin in our Motorola RAZR VE20 review. Is the RAZR name still alive and well on Sprint?
Review summary of the Motorola RAZR VE20:
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 The Motorola RAZR VE20 is the best RAZR on the market right now. We've been uttering that phrase about once a year for the last four years or so, and it's no less true now. The RAZR VE20 is a fine phone. It doesn't break any new ground, except for its sleek, polished interface, but it gets a lot of things right. Making phone calls, for one thing, is a good experience on the MOTORAZR VE20. GPS navigation works well; there's plenty of messaging options; and music isn't bad either, despite the lack of equipment. So what if it's a RAZR, let Motorola worry about that. It's a fine feature phone, and it isn't a bad choice for someone looking for a flashy phone with plenty under the hood. Release: August 2008. Price: $100.
Pros: Curvy, feminine new design for RAZR family. Polished user interface and menu screens. Loads of multimedia features.
Cons: There's nothing wrong with being a RAZR. MicroSD card slot buried under battery. We'd like to have more memory. Web browser lousy and dated. Streaming services can't keep up with downloads.
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Full Motorola RAZR VE20 Review:
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Design - Very good
The RAZR design has taken a strange, but not unappealing turn in the new Motorola RAZR VE20. Remember the original RAZR? Of course you do. That phone stood for sharp edges, a supremely thin housing and a tight, one-piece feel. The RAZR VE20 is curvy, a bit flimsy, and has some color accents, rubbery port covers and a rather bulky shell, at least for modern, stylish clamshells. But it's a fine, contemporary-looking 3G multimedia phone, and it blends in nicely with Sprint's lineup (especially the Sanyo Katana Eclipse, also just released).
The interface is one of the best designs we've seen on a RAZR, most similar to the RAZR2 V8. We especially liked the favorites menu that wraps around the standby screen, it seemed to put the usually dead space to good use. But every screen, from the calling screens to the very nice e-mail app, seemed polished and fresh. The features might not be up to speed, but the interface feels nicely à la mode.
The external screen is a bit of a letdown. The outside of the flip features a 1.6-inch, 65,000-color display, but it looked washed out and had a noticeable screen door effect. It wasn't as bright or as large as the screen on the older MOTORAZR Maxx Ve.
Just like on the more recent Motorola RAZR2 V9m, which now has been discontinued by Sprint, the RAZR VE20 has touch sensitive buttons integrated into the external display. They worked pretty well, and Motorola makes you jump through plenty of hoops to activate those buttons, so surely they won't be set off in your pocket. From the external screen, you can access the music player, view a photo album or check SMS messages, among other features.
Calling - Very good
Calls from the Motorola RAZR VE20 sounded pretty good. We tested the phone driving down the road with the windows rolled down, and callers had no trouble making out our voices with little background noise. Sprint reception is an issue in our part of suburban New Jersey, but the RAZR VE20 always managed 2 bars, even while other Sprint phones were already roaming. For battery life, we managed a solid 5+ hour call, while Motorola only promises four hours of talk time.
We especially like the modern look of the calling features on the VE20. The address book is polished and well-organized. The calling screens have nice graphics and a clear font. The whole UI seems very new, and this is reflected nowhere better than in the basic phone functions. Also, the phone has all of our favorite calling features. We liked the easy-to-use speaker-independent voice dialer. The VE20 had a loud speakerphone with its own dedicated button. We also appreciated the Bluetooth settings mapped to the favorites menu, which made pairing faster. Finally, conference calling couldn't have been easier to accomplish.
Messaging - Very good
The MOTORAZR VE20 is a sometimes competent, sometimes very good messaging phone. The phone has a nice range of messaging options, including SMS, Voice SMS, MMS for picture mail, IM and e-mail. Of these, the IM client was average, the standard OZ client for AOL, MSN and Yahoo. The e-mail client, however, is Sprint's very good Sprint Mobile E-mail app. It's nicely organized into tabs and the font was clean and easy to read on the VE20's screen. We found presets for AOL, Hotmail, Gmail and others, plus the option to set up POP and IMAP accounts manually. We set the phone up for Gmail and were pleasantly surprised with how quickly we were alerted to new mail.
The keypad on the Motorola VE20 is classic RAZR, a single piece of metal. But that doesn't mean it isn't wide and nicely textured. In fact, once we trusted our fingers to find the right keys, we found typing easy and comfortable on the VE20.
Multimedia - Good
The MOTORAZR VE20 has the full salvo of Sprint's Power Vision services. The phone has access to the Sprint Music Store, the streaming Sprint TV channels and the always-intriguing Sprint Movies app. The menu for these services is a mess, but they have some interesting options that might be useful in a pinch. For instance, new releases included "I Am Legend" and a few animated movies, including a Batman video and an Appleseed feature. When reception was good, and the planets were aligned properly, the video playback was smooth, though the video player offered no control, so don't think about leaving that phone for a minute unless you want to miss the movie, or repeat the whole chapter. This video service might serve as a useful novelty, but it will never compete with a real movie download store and some good media playback and transfer software.
Of course, this phone's real multimedia raison d'être might be music, since music is the app that gets its own buttons on the external display. The phone has access to the Sprint Music Store, with all its quirks and wonderfully deep crevaces. The music player is only slightly less basic than the video player, but it still offers little fine tuning or manual control. Still, you can jump right into your music with the flip closed.
We were very happy to find a 3.5mm headphone jack on the Motorola RAZR VE20, which allowed us to listen to music with any headphones we had handy. Of course, to listen to your music you'll need a larger memory card, as the 256MB microSD card might have been useful a couple years ago, but we're not happy unless we're counting in gigabytes these days. Finally, as long as we're transferring music, a microUSB cable would have been a nice addition to the retail box, but it was sadly omitted.
Web browser - Mediocre
The Motorola RAZR VE20 comes with a fairly basic WAP browser. It managed to chew through our homepage, and what it spit out was recognizable, but not pretty. Reception made a huge impact on speed, but the browser was so basic that we didn't do enough Web surfing to worry about how fast we were loading pages. For emergencies only, perhaps.
Camera - Mediocre
The 2-megapixel camera on the Motorola Razr VE20 took some fine cell phone pics, but nothing terribly impressive. The phone does have a camcorder feature that can record QVGA videos, which is pretty good for this class of phone, but the videos themselves had a wavy quality, so the feature didn't benefit from the enhanced resolution.
Serious Happy Snap
Kind of blurry, with lots of noise in the darker parts of this editor's black shirt.
Commando
The reds and oranges just exploded in this picture, which may be the point, but it looks a little overdone to us. Details are okay, you can just make out the assortment number up top, but you can't read the Hasbro logo at the bottom, though it's perfectly clear in real life.
GPS Navigation - Good
The Motorola RAZR VE20 uses Sprint Navigation for GPS directions, and the program is pretty up-to-date with the features we've come to like. The app has built-in traffic advisories, and it will update you on upcoming traffic incidents and suggest a way around. Occasionally that might be the long way, but you won't be sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic. On one trip, we accepted an alternate, then decided against it but didn't tell the phone. Unfortunately, after suggesting numerous U-turns, it gave up and we had to start navigating from scratch, though this wasn't too difficult. When it was locked on, it tracked us nicely, and we like that turn-by-turn direction show up on the external screen while the flip is closed, with the diminishing distance to the next point of action.
Value - Mediocre
Okay, we've been holding off bashing the RAZR brand until now. RAZRs plummet in price like no other phone, so maybe this won't be an issue for long, but this phone is launching for $100, when it really should be as close to free as possible. This isn't a ground-breaking device in terms of features, no matter how polished the interface. If Sprint wants to sign up new customers, and if Motorola wants to keep pushing RAZRs, the price needs to be right, and that right is free.
Price and availability
The Motorola RAZR VE20 is available now for $150 from Sprint. A $50 mail-in rebate is available when signing up for a qualifying plan.
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