A few years ago, the RAZR mobile phone from Motorola was revered as being a great phone with great features – it was thin, stylish, great to use and popular. Towards the end of last year Motorola resurrected the RAZR brand name with a new Android powered mobile phone, and the new incarnation of the RAZR brand is thin (to a point), stylish, and great to use.

For very short periods of time.

The problem lies in the fact that it’s thin. Or claimed to be thin. Let’s get this out of the way, first.

From a marketing point of view, every mobile phone manufacturer wants you to believe that their phone is the best. Biggest screen. Fastest. Thinnest. Whatever.

Motorola claim to have made this RAZR very thin – following the footsteps of its earlier brethren – but in so doing, the ultimate performance of the phone’s battery has been seriously compromised. In general day-to-day use, I am truly lucky if the battery will last beyond 1pm – that’s about five hours’ active life. At night, I need to disable the bluetooth and WiFi facilities in order for it to see more than five hours on a night on the town. At a recent conference, it died on me during the second session on the first day, and I needed to set it onto a recharger in order to extract a day’s usable life from it.

This is simply not a practical usage footprint for a phone.

As to calling the phone “thin” … I truly dislike marketing spin, and here we have a grand example of this sad practice. Let’s look at the profile of the phone …

While yes, it’s thin, there’s also the issue of that bump that you see, visible here on the right hand side of this image. While much of – most of – the phone is indeed quite thin, the bump changes everything, and the reality is that the phone is actually thicker than the marketing blurb tries to claim. And of course, through making the phone that thin, the battery’s capacity and daily lifetime seems to have suffered significantly.

I would much rather have a thicker phone with a practical daily usage footprint than a phone that I need to carry a charger with in order to use it beyond lunchtime.

Let’s get to the real stuff: what’s the phone like to use?

Basically, this is a very usable and competent phone. As with all similar Android powered phones, the RAZR comes with a host of functionality, covering messaging, email, camera and video, GPS, and hell, you can even use it to make phone calls!

Call quality is quite good, likewise image quality from the camera, and sound quality is great too. The AMOLED screen offers a bright colourful image, and being made of Gorilla Glass, it’s very strong and resistant to most forms of physical abuse.

In terms of software customisation, Motorola have done a couple of good things, and a couple of not so good things.

For instance, they’ve created what they call “Smart Actions”. These are basically a set of steps that the phone can automatically follow when some predefined conditions have been met. For instance, I’ve set up a smart action for when I get to the radio station. At the station, I’ll typically be in the studio broadcasting, and so the last thing I want to have is the phone ringing loudly while I’m on the air talking. So I can define a condition whereby the phone identifies where I am, and if that happens to be at the station, then the phone is set to silent and bluetooth is turned off. I need to conserve my battery, remember? When I leave the station, the phone detects the change of location, and re-enables the ring tones and bluetooth. As I’ll usually be in the car at this time, the bluetooth will then automatically connect to my hands-free unit and I’m all set for my drive home.

This is all very good.

As is their in-car cradle. A simple device that attaches to the car’s windscreen via a suction cap, this allows for the safe (and legal) use of your phone while driving, as well as recharging through the supplied adapter cables. The cables also provide for audio out from the phone, so that if your car radio has provision for Aux in, you can direct your phone’s audio output into your car radio for greater volume, using the phone as an MP3 player, or perhaps streaming music from some other source on the internet.

And while I like the car cradle, I’m a little disappointed at the way the phone’s firmware has been integrated into use when the cradle is being used. Let me explain: as a very experienced computer programmer, I learned a very important lesson a very long time ago, and that lesson is to never make any assumptions about how your end users might choose to use their product. Their product being the product that you are working on (also known as your product), but it is always very much their product: they’re paying for it, for one thing.

So, what’s the issue here?

When you mount the phone into its cradle and then connect the power connector, this automatically switches the phone into its car mode for you. Never mind that you might not want this to occur: you have no choice. Some programmer at Motorola has dictated to us that this must be the way that we must use the phone, and if we don’t like it, too bad.

Well, I’m here to tell that programmer that they’re wrong, and that is a very high-handed and arrogant decision that have have made, and in my case, I strongly resent the fact that they think they know how I might wish to use my phone while I’m in the car.

So, for the record: no, I do not want to use it in landscape mode: you got that part wrong. And no, I do not want to use it in your car mode. Not all of the time, anyway. Rather than forcing this sort of thing on me – which is what they’ve done, the better way to do this is by way of a simple setting within the phone’s settings. Let me make this choice, rather than forcing it upon me.

At least they’re not forcing me to log into Motoblur here; that was a similarly bad programming decision (well, marketing decision, probably) that came with the original Motorola Defy. They’ve learned from that experience; let’s hope that in a forthcoming firmware update they fix this issue as well.

Overall, I like the phone. I just wish it would last longer than a morning when in general use.