Motorola Razr V3

This is a classic cellphone that changed the way mobile phones should look like. I consider it the stepping stone to all the smartphones we see today. It broke through the barrier in that cell phones should only be as good as the calls they make.

It was really the first with a stylish, trendsetting design that was aimed at people who loved individuality and self-expression above all. Really ahead of its time, you can still get a Rzor V3 for $60 and it still doesn’t look outdated. The extreme light-weight, paper thin, cutting edge design is easy to put in a pocket without feeling that it’s going to get lost.

Motorola Rzor V3 features

The display screen of the outer part supports 4,000 colors and shows the time, battery life, signal strength, and caller ID. The VGA camera can take pics and video in three resolutions: 640×480, 320×240 and 160×120. Although it doesn’t reach a good level of megapixels and the pictures are often grainy at best, you still have the 4X zoom and can adjust the brightness or choose from six lighting conditions which weren’t bad at all for being one of the first models of its kind.

The above is especially right when you actually can send the pictures to your friends or 1,000 contacts available (it is the maximum it can store) in your phone directory, or save them as wallpaper, a very personable feature that all brands emulated later, along with color settings, screensavers, and all sort of sounds. The only problem was the photo storage of a laughable 6MB, unless you have an SD card.

The original idea of a cellphone with tons on handy features goes along also with the voice-recorder button on the right side of the front flap, and a volume control on the left. Initially, people complained that the buttons were too thin but grew accustomed with this new way of seeing things.

Motorola Rzor V3 Display Screen

The main cellphone display screen is a 2.5 inch with 160,000 colors which was great for the time, given its crisp and vivid quality. The call, end and number buttons are slim as we already mentioned. The center buttons offer shortcuts to the main application and you can even customize that.

The basic 14 monophonic and 5 polyphonic ring tones can also offer the option of downloading more through the WAP 2.0 wireless web browser, depending of your local provider. You can even have MP3 file support, a calculator, voice and speaker dialing, a calendar, an alarm clock, and a voice recorder. You can receive emails as you have support for POP3, SMTP, and IMAP4. This was also the first models with full Bluetooth connectivity.

The phone can charge through a USB port cable, as well as synchronize with the PC through Motorola Phone Tools. The battery life can last a good 7 hours and 10 days of stand-by time. It is highly recommendable to get a backup BR50 battery since they’re not that long lasting in terms of quality.

As call quality, it is clear, but maybe the volume level is too low for those who like to speak loudly, or maybe it would have been helpful for anyone with a hearing impairment. The same goes for the ring-tone volume. Finally, it is definitely a classic model that doesn’t go out of date easily.