Listening to: The Crystal Method – Vegas

Ok, so I ran out to the Verizon store.. even took a cab there. Bought the new razr v3c, and tried it out. DISAPPOINTMENT. Ok so the phone is super cool and sleek and lightweight etc. However there were a few things that prevented me from adopting it. It’s a bit outdated in terms of physical functionality nowadays.. no mem card slot, no headphone jack. The keypad wasn’t quite as textured as I would like it to be… When using it in a dark room, I had to actually look at the keys to see what I was pressing. I’m a little more used to feeling it out and navigating with a little more tactile feedback from the keyboard. (like Das Keyboard!). But the main thing that killed the razr v3c for me was the speed of the UI. Now, the Verizon UI that their putting on all their new phones nowadays isn’t all bad. It’s on my LG VX7000, and once you get to know it, its good.. a bit simplistic, but good. So besides the crippled bluetooth, I didn’t mind the Verizon ui on the Razr. However, it was S-L-O-W! To search for and dial a number in my phonebook, I could hit the key sequence before the phone could even switch from the home screen! I would hit the contacts and then the first 2 letters of my contacts name and then send, and 5 seconds later you would see the phone quickly flip through the screens and then freeze for another second or two, and then dial the number. Not good. This lag was consistent throughout the whole UI. Scrolling through menus, there would be a slight lag on the response, so you would often pass the line you want to select in a list. It was also quite annoying having that lag when switching ringers, ringtones etc. Also, V-cast. Although I thought the vcast service was pretty cool, when watching videos, even when I have full reception, the razr drops frames left and right, and unsyncs the audio. It feels like its having trouble rendering the video in time or something.
I returned the razr to the store the next day, and talked with a tech about it. He said that yeah, the razr is slow, and they might fix it with a firmware update.. but it might be a while, because most people don’t really notice the slow ui.

Guess I’ll just wait for another good one…