Chickin Wings

Played with some phones @ Verizon Wireless today

The two I was most interested in: Motorola Droid Razr and HTC Rezound.

I walked into the store and was asked if I needed anything. I told the kind lady that I am due for an upgrade at the end of next month and that I’m “on the market” (this was a mistake - once she knew I wasn’t going to buy right then and there I was completely left alone). I asked her if they had a Rezound on display and she pointed me towards the 4G devices.

I went straight for the Rezound, as I was most eager to open up everything and see if it ran better than my Droid 1. No surprises here - it opened the apps easily and ran smoothly, much to the contrast of my current phone which force closes EVERY app, EVERY time. Much to my delight, speedtest.net showed a DL rate in the neighborhood of 15mb/s. WOW. Just… wow. Googling stuff was ridicufast, and the Rezound (if I’m not mistaken) is equipped with a dual-core processor to handle 4GLTE speeds.
After testing out the processor, I tried out the Beats Music option with the provided headphones (the music app was pretty, but IMO nothing compares to the simplicity of the classic iPod interface). There’s a toggle between normal mode and Beats mode, and neither seemed to produce better quality sound than the other, just different equalizations. This would have to be further investigated to see if there really is a difference.

So then it was time to check out the Droid Razr. The very first thing I noticed about this device - despite being slim, this thing is MASSIVE. The phone is very thin, but the other dimensions are enormous. Like, you need to have Shaq’s hands to handle this thing. Well, I have very small hands so maybe it’s not for me. The speed test produced similar results to that of the Rezound. I also noticed that the main camera proudly advertised a 1080p resolution. 1080p!! And what better to see that kind of resolution than on Verizon’s own… uhh laptop thing whose name escapes me.
On the table for $200, the Droid display laptop took the Razr’s screen and displayed it on a laptop-compatible interface. This thing is not worth $200. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to scroll through a webpage. One redeeming quality is that the touchpad supports two-finger scrolling, but it didn’t really help. Hitting page down emulated the use of a tab button on a real laptop, just scrolling item by item. Not useful in the slightest.

A couple of the other phones I tried, namely the Pantech, were hot to the touch, which is never a good sign, even if they were all plugged in to charge. Neither Droid Razr nor HTC Rezound showed any preliminary signs of overheating.

All in all, there’s no way my hands can fit around the Droid Razr on a day-to-day basis, but the Rezound showed promise. Should be able to get one on Amazon for about $250, need to start saving up! To hell with my Droid 1!