“I’m not a cell phone guy. I resisted getting one at all for years, and even now I rarely carry it. &uarr,[…]“—well, ↑John, I guess we’re in the same league now ;-) With the exception that I am carrying it all the time. ↵Keitai at its best. During the last months the need for having a cell phone somehow became virulent. So I went out and got myself a black ↑Motorola V3 Razr. Hereby I publicly confess that—like the guys ↑at the Mobile Gazette—I fell for the device’s looks. IMHO it’s a greatly designed clamshell. I especially dig its thinness (13.9mm) and the nickel-plated copper-alloy keypad, which has the symbols chemically etched into an electro-luminescent strip, featuring cool blue backlighting. Not exactly geeky, as the Razr really is a mainstream commodity, but I like the keypad and the design nevertheless. After some twenty minutes I managed to one-handedly open and close the clamshell in a relaxed posture, without running the risk of clumsily dropping the thing to the floor. I pwn. As with all contemporary cells, the gadget is stuffed with all kinds of features. 90% of which I just do neither need nor want. Usable to me are: the calendar, the phonebook, SMS, phone [surprise!], and—believe it or not—the camera. All the other junk I’d really like to rip out. And I will immediately when I find the time to dig into the Razr-hacks I found on the Internet’s better side.

To me it really feels good to be wirelessly wired all the time. The Razr is thin an lightweight, accordingly it’s not an inconvenience to have it in my trousers-pocket all the time. Every now or then something strikes my eye—I whip out the phone and take a picture. If the camera wouldn’t be integrated, I’d never carry a camera around with me. At least not all the time. Indeed some of the pictures here in my weblog already were taken with the phone. But exactly at this point the problems start to arise, as I somehow have to get the pictures out of the phone and into one of my computers. Together with the phone all kinds of accessories came. Including a USB-cable and a CD with a software-pack called “mobile phone tools”. The latter promise nothing less than a complete marriage between cell phone and computer. All right, let’s do it.

When I hook up the phone to my laptop via the USB-cable the thing immediately is convinced that its battery now gets charged. If it picks up the current on the USB-port, that’s ok by me. But after disconnecting again, the battery is less charged than before. Did the phone charge my laptop’s battery? Great service, indeed—but I didn’t ask for that.

Next thing is that the accompanying software doesn’t work properly—despite of its over-designed GUI. XP already warned me during the first installation. I went on nevertheless, everything worked fine, alas very slow. Just like the interface of the phone itself. Next time when I connected, the software completely refused to recognize or even find the phone. So I uninstalled and reinstalled. Everything worked fine. Do I have to install the software anew every time I want to connect the phone to the laptop? I tried it on another comp—same thing. The whole program IMHO is a piece of … well, let’s phrase it differently, as a friend once said to me on IRC: “I am disappointed of you that you are using such a shabby piece of software …”

Maybe the whole process left some scars inside my phone. From a certain point on the phone was convinced of being charged all the time. Then suddenly it said that its battery was empty, so I hooked it up to the charger. Battery full again, dishook. Thing thinks that it still is being charged. Half an hour later the battery is empty again. And so on. Finally the thing’s OS more or less crashed. I mean, c’mon, it’s just a phone, not a map-editor or even a 3D-render-farm! I am instantaneously ready to forgive if the latter named complex artefact crashes on me. But a phone crashing! A PHONE! Anyway, I rebooted the phone, and ATM everything works. I wonder for how long. All in all I completely second ↑this review.