Motorola Razr V3x in Cosmic Blue

Features
One of the things Motorola is emphasising with the Razr V3x is its surround sound. You won't get to appreciate this through the single speaker on the back of the handset, which outputs to a reasonable volume but doesn't deliver much by way of depth.

Plug in the provided headset and the aural complexion changes completely, as you would expect. Volume is still only reasonable--you might find it an issue in places with a lot of ambient noise. But bass levels are good and the stereo is fine. The 3D surround system, 'Spatial Audio', won't appeal to all, but we found it added a little something to playback.

	The mini camera on the inside of the V3x caters for 3G video calling.

What's annoying is that while you fiddle with the Bass Boost and Spatial Audio settings, sound output is turned off--how much nicer it would be to hear the effect of choosing between levels 1 to 7 for each of these as you fiddle, instead of having to go back to the player's screen to hear the effects.

The 2-megapixel camera shot images of decent quality. Colours weren't quite a sharp as we'd like, but we've definitely seen worse. There is a switch to macro mode just below the main screen. This makes close-ups possible, but you have to ensure a steady hand to stop things from blurring.

There is a light rather than a flash, and you turn this on and off using a menu. It takes five clicks to turn it on, another five to turn it off--and it won't go off automatically. The good thing about the light is its brightness--it'll double as a torch very easily.

There's 62MB of memory built-into the Razr V3x and a slot under the battery for a microSD (aka TransFlash) card so you can boost this further. The camera saved images to our microSD card at an impressive speed, so that getting them from phone to your computer should be fast and easy using a card reader. Another route is to use the Phone Tools software Motorola provides which you can use for file transfer, synchronising the Razr V3x's calendar and contact book with your main computer, and backing up the phone, among other tasks.

Performance
We'd have liked more volume all round, but voice and video calls--and indeed video streaming in general--was of a good quality. The large, clear, bright screen certainly helps here.

You won't get a huge amount of life out of the battery as Motorola's suggestion of 99 minutes of video talk from a full charge indicates. But as the Razr V3x is not really intended as a full-frontal music player, and assuming you aren't going to want to make lengthy video calls every day, you should be able to get by for a couple of days between charges.

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