The Motorola RAZR V3 ("RAZR" pronounced "razor"), at 13.9-mm thick, is an unusually thin clamshell camera phone, released in November 2004.
The phone's thinness is one of its distinctive features, but not the only one. Its aircraft-grade anodized aluminium case is another, as is the flat keypad, made with a nickel-plated copper-alloy with numbers and symbols chemically etched into an electro-luminescent strip. Its internal antenna is located at the base of the phone, beneath the microphone, which gives the phone a more balanced feel when in use.
Customer response has in general been very positive; by July 2005 Motorola reported to analysts that the RAZR V3 was the most popular clamshell in Europe. There have been some complaints about lack of support for storage expansion and the phone's small amount of memory.
The phone is carried by Cingular and T-Mobile in the USA and by many companies in other countries. Motorola also released a CDMA version of the RAZR in the summer of 2005, and plans to release a similar version (called the RAZR V3c) for the 2005 holiday season in the United States. Upgrades to the GSM version include a 1.3 megapixel camera, 15-second video capture, more memory, and (for Verizon) EVDO support.
Motorola has also announced the Motorola V1150, which was renamed as the RAZR V3x, a phone with two cameras and support for TransFlash. The phone is not the successor, Motorola has confirmed [1] that "RAZR V3x" is simply a new name for the existing V1150 and the phone will not be released in the US.
Technical specifications
The quadband GSM phone sports dual color displays, a VGA camera, long-range Bluetooth, MPEG4 video clip playback and recording ( with firmware upgrade ), and Java 2 with 3D graphics. It also has a 22 kHz speaker for full MP3 ringtones.
Black version
A black version was produced for distribution in the 77th Academy Awards gift bags, and was released in early May 2005. As of September 2005, the black version is available in the USA only from Cingular.
References
As of November 2005, Rogers Video & Wireless in Canada now carrie the Black Razr.