Motorola DROID RAZR HD review: Now in HD

INTRODUCTION

Roughly a year after Motorola brought the RAZR franchise back to the masses, we have the second generation of the popular DROID on our hands. The Motorola DROID RAZR HD for Verizon Wireless comes to the market hot on the heels of its frameless baby brother, bringing a few extra tricks to go with the more impressive screen.

Roughly a year after Motorola brought the RAZR franchise back to the masses, we have the second generation of the popular DROID on our hands. The Motorola DROID RAZR HD for Verizon Wireless comes to the market hot on the heels of its frameless baby brother, bringing a few extra tricks to go with the more impressive screen.

Key features

CDMA/EVDO network support

Quad-band GSM and 3G support (available only outside of the United States with Verizon roaming)

LTE network support

21 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA

4.7" 16M-color Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with HD resolution (1280 x 720 pixels); Corning Gorilla Glass

Superb build quality; Kevlar coated, splash resistant body

Lightly customized Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich

1.5 GHz dual-core Krait CPU; Adreno 225 GPU; Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960 chipset

1 GB of RAM and 16GB of storage; microSD card slot

8 MP autofocus camera with LED flash; face detection and geotagging; 1080p video recording

1.3MP front-facing camera for video-chat

Wi-Fi b/g/n and DLNA

NFC connectivity with Android Beam preinstalled

GPS with A-GPS

Accelerometer, proximity sensor and auto-brightness sensor; compass

Standard 3.5 mm audio jack

microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v 4.0

microHDMI port

Beefy 2500mAh battery with good performance

Smart dialing, voice dialing

Google Chrome preinstalled as the default web browser

DivX/XviD video support

Office document editor

Main disadvantages

No dedicated camera button

CPU and chipset not on par with the latest crop of competitors

Battery is not user-replaceable

Huge amount of preinstalled bloatware

Even a quick glance at the spec sheet of the Motorola DROID RAZR HD is more than enough to show how massive an improvement the newcomer is over its predecessor. At the same time Motorola's designers have been extremely conservative with the looks of the DROID RAZR HD - the smartphone is unmistakably a RAZR.

Google's touch is strongly felt throughout the software of the device - staring with the barely modified UI, all the way to Google Chrome being the default web browser. An update to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean is promised before year's end, so the overly anxious have no reasons to worry about being left with the cold Ice Cream Sandwich for long.

However, we can't help but notice that, even at its launch, the Motorola DROID RAZR HD appears outgunned by some of its competitors in terms of processing power. Quad-core is the talk of town these days and the latest DROID RAZR is not a member of the elite club. Read on to find out if it has enough other talents to overcome its shortage of CPU cores.