Performance and Battery life
While almost all other manufacturer is
talking about innovative cameras, quad-core processor and fussy style, Motorola
has decided to make battery life become its bread and butter. The trend started
with the Droid RAZR MAXX – the first phone we have ever seen with what could be
called an excessively large battery. The RAZR MAXX HD keeps the same 3,300mAh non-removable
pack while the thinner sibling goes with a 2,500mAh one. That is significant
upgrade over 2012’s model and one that delivers a stunning amount of longevity.
Under normal usage, the RAZR HD sails through a full day easily, and two days
is well reach with judicious use of the screen. On our battery drain test
(which involves looping a video with the display brightness set at 50%, WiFi
and GPS turned on), the RAZR HD chugged along for an impressive 10 hours and 42
minutes – that’s longer than most tablets. The MAXX HD only takes things
further, testing this reviewer’s patience by refusing to die for 14 hours and 4
minutes. That does not quite match the epic longevity of the first MAXX, but
it’s still a nearly unheard of number. What’s more, both lasted almost a full
hour longer than Motorola’s official figures – that’s so exciting and
surprising.
RAZR
MAXX HD’ 3,300mAh battery
The dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 inside
is hardly advanced any more, but it’s still more than enough to keep the handset
runs fast. Navigating the UI is smooth, seamless and the device hardly seems to
break a sweat firing up most applications. Even those heavy 3D games like Dead
Space and Grand Theft Auto III hum along on the new RAZRs. However, we
regularly encounter serious lag with the keyboard. Quite often, the keyboard
would take a few seconds to catch up to our typing, and memory-intensive apps
like Chrome seemed to exacerbate this matter.
Droid
RAZR HD & MAXX HD
·
Quadrant: 4,982
·
Vellamo 2.0: 1,631
·
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms) 1,914
·
An Tu Tu: 6,674
·
GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt Offscreen (fps): 13
·
CF-Bench: 9,547
Motorola Droid RAZR M
·
Quadrant: 4,944
·
Vellamo 2.0: 1,648
·
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms) 1,951
·
An Tu Tu: 6,364
·
GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt Offscreen (fps): 13
·
CF-Bench: 9,392
Galaxy S III (Verizon)
·
Quadrant: 4,937
·
Vellamo 2.0: 1,627
·
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms) 1,740
·
An Tu Tu: 6,857
·
GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt Offscreen (fps): 13
·
CF-Bench: 9,375
The phone maintain their positions in tests
and as expected, kept pace with many phones on the market with the same 1.5GHz
Snapdragon internals. The SunSpider score of 1,914 is quite significantly, despite
the surprisingly high considering similarly specked devices from Samsung and
Moto have completed the test much faster in the past. On the other hand, our
quantitative testing turned up no surprises. These serious powerhouses such as the
Galaxy Note II and the Optimus G can run faster than RAZR, but even the most
demanding users will rarely need this type of horsepower that regularly. More
important for casual users will be the ability to consume data with impressive
speed and HD did not disappoint. During several tests, we averaged about 17Mbps
download and 14Mbps upload around New York City. We also found that call
quality is surprisingly clear, based on the poor performance of its smaller
sibling, the RAZR M, in this area.
Camera
RAZR
MAXX HD’s camera is on the top of the device
We are beginning to believe that Motorola found
a formula for effective shooting way back with the Droid X and has not really changed
much since then. Of course, things have become better, just not so much. We do
not say that we are disappointed with the image quality here – far from it
actually. The camera has always been a strong point of Motorola phones and the
same is true with the new RAZR brothers. Both have an 8-megapixel sensor
inside, the same as you would find in the RAZR M, Droid RAZR, Bionic and all
high-end Moto devices since 2010. While the number of pixels has not increased,
the image clarity and saturation has. In daylight, images are bright and colorful,
on par with most point-and-shoots. Even indoors and under artificial light, the
results are quite good, although we would recommend setting the flash off
unless necessary. The new camera interface also improves over previous models
with a less cluttered presentation and controls that are more agile. Perhaps
our favorite feature is the ability to detect the phone in less-than-ideal
lighting conditions and prompt you to switch to HDR mode.
RAZR
MAXX HD and RAZR HD sample shot
The video quality is less impressive
compared to still photos, but it is not a weak point. The results were quite
reasonable and colors were well saturated, though there was some noise found in
dark parts of the frame. Perhaps the biggest criticism against the video is the
lack of image stabilization. While we do not expect Motorola to insert optical image
stabilization into an already extremely dense phone, some digital smoothing of
our visible jitters would have been greatly appreciated. Sound recorded by the
RAZR HD was so great. As you can hear in the sample clip, midday traffic and a
strong wind are reduced to a dull background hum and this reviewer’s narration
can be heard loud and clear over the din.
Sample
shot from RAZR MAXX HD and RAZR HD
