Motorola RAZR2-V9m Review - Features

The Sprint TV app underwent a minor face-lift for the V9m, but the Sprint Music Store sadly is still in need of a redesign.  I love Sprint’s Groove Mobile-powered Music Store for its huge catalog, quick downloads, and 99 cents per track pricing; I hate the fact that you can’t shop buy album or even manually add an album’s worth of tracks to your shopping cart for automatic download.  Rumor is there’s an upgrade to the store coming in mid-November; my fingers are crossed.

Still, the V9m makes it easy to access your multimedia and messages from the external display, and the handset is pretty feature-rich for a “non-smartphone.”  In addition to solid organizer apps, you can also do nifty things like assign Photo and Video Caller IDs to your contacts.  The handset also supports J2ME Java gaming, and four demos came pre-installed on my review unit.  Would it kill you, Sprint, to give us the full-version of Ms. Pac Man for free?  Please?

Sprint also offers a bunch of extras including the excellent On Demand program for quick News, Weather, and other info-centric updates, and NFL Mobile for all you football junkies out there.  In addition to the Sprint TV offerings, you can also rent and view full-length feature films on the V9m in true pay-per-view style.  Streaming video quality wasn’t great, but honestly it was on part with other Sprint TV-compatible handsets I’ve tried.  Programs were a bit pixelated and tended to stutter during playback.  The full-length movie I rented actually played back quite a bit more smoothly than Sprint TV offerings.

Integrated A-GPS offers location-aware services on the V9m.  Sprint’s GPS offerings include “Where” and the TeleNav-developed Sprint Navigation.  I was a little partial to Where.  The phone is also compatible with Sprint’s Wireless Backup system, which saves your contacts and other info to a server for wireless restoration if you need it (in case you lose your phone, buy a new one, etc).

Generally all of the offerings on my sample V9m worked well, but I did run into some hiccups and glitches now and then.  While I always checked the “do not remind me again” box when warnings about applications wanting network access popped up, I seemed to always be warned and asked permission the next time, anyway.  Also, some amount of flipping the handset open and shut seemed to be necessary to navigate or exit applications from the external screen.

What’s cool about the V9m’s camera is that it’s mounted above an external display that doubles as a viewfinder - perfect for those wacky self-portraits of you and your girls at the club!  What’s bad about the V9m’s camera is that there’s no flash or assist light, so those photos snapped in the dark of the club aren’t going to come out.

The V9m’s two-megapixel shooter is about average for a 2MP cameraphone, which is to say that photos come out pretty well so long as they’re taken in good lighting.  Colors and detail were pretty good in optimal lighting conditions, but degraded as lighting diminished - that’s on par with most cameraphones in this range.  Photos taken in the dark are going to be fuzzy and grainy at best.   There’s also a 4x digital zoom and your choice of five resolutions in which to capture your photos.

Photo-related software on the V9m is better than average, with great options for sending your photos off via MMS or Email or even uploading them directly to the Web after you’ve snapped them.  You can also print photos directly on a compatible printer or through a Sprint-offered pay service, or transfer them to your computer via Bluetooth.

Video capture is also supported on the V9m.  Videos shot in MMS mode are capped at 10 seconds, while standard video clips can be as long as you want so long as there’s available storage space in the phone’s memory or on an inserted microSD card.