On Razor Cell Phones

The Motorola Razor/RAZR cell phones provide many features which allow users to do a number of cool things. The original Razor, the Razor V3, was a great messaging phone that became incredibly popular due to its slim design and good price. The recently released Razor 2 has a number of great new features too. Let's compare the messaging features on Razor cell phones.

The Razor V3:

The Razor V3 includes standard messaging options such as SMS and MMS, as well as support for various e-mail protocols and instant messaging (IM) protocols. These are the supported protocols on all Razor cell phones.

On the SMS side, the keypad has been surprisingly effective in allowing quick text messaging, although, at the time of production, the standard predictive text software used was T9. Motorola changed this by using the Lexicus Software iTAP method, which was at first seen as a mistake but has never became much of a hindrance for most. It only means that some people will have to change some of their habits, but at the time of release it received very few complaints.

On the MMS side, the Razor V3 comes included with a number of pre-installed templates that make it easy to send greeting cards for birthdays, anniversaries etc. with a touch of a few buttons. The MMS system is user friendly and makes creating multimedia rich messages very easy. Simply take a few snaps with the integrated camera (on later models, 1.3 megapixels) and put your photos quickly in an MMS, write some text around it, and send. Great for sending postcard greetings and that sort of thing.

The IM protocols on the phone include AOL, Yahoo!, MSN and ICQ. Instant messaging on a cell phone is a great way to communicate and keep up to date with your friends and family during the day (provided they are logged on, of course), without having to send and receive constant text messages and fill up the phone's memory. Furthermore, chats stay on the IM's database so that you can access it or continue it on your laptop or PC when you get back to the office or home. IM is also very useful for businesses (especially small businesses) to keep up to date with what is going on at the office, regardless of where you may be in the world (fortunately, the Razor's are mainly quad-band phones which makes it easy to have international roaming on the phone with your service provider).

Motorola also installed Wireless Village IM on the phone, which is an IM chat program mixed with some social networking ideas like sharing your status and mood with your friends or family. Wireless Village also has public chat rooms and search capabilities to find a conversation that may interest you. Small businesses could take advantage of this capability and use it for a conference scenario.

E-mail protocols supported on the Razor V3 are POP3, IMAP4 and SMTP.

The Razor 2

The Razor 2 phone includes the same support for IM, e-mail, MMS and SMS, except it has undergone a few design changes that make it unique compared to the V3 and increase the usability of what you can do on Razor cell phones.

The large touch-screen external display (larger than some cell phone main screens) on the Razor 2 allows you to view messages without needing to open the phone. Since the Razor 2 runs off of Linux software (as all new Motorola phones do) it has made the interface much more customizable and easier to use (plus, just more sleek looking). A slighty larger keypad design also makes it easier and more smooth to message on the phone.