Razer Phone Review: Should You Buy It? (One Month Later) By Erica Griffin

Hey everybody: this is Erica the technology nerd likes to film stuff, and this is the razor phone now I have been using it for about a month now, and I want to answer the questions for you: is it worth buying, or should you buy it? I can give a little of a conclusion at the beginning. Yes, razor is late to the game and there are many other phones out there to choose from with similar core specs, but this phone feels a bit future-proof for performance and media consumption and also has some things that other phones don't have. This isn't just a phone aimed at gamers, but for those who, like the most performance possible out of their device, I think the first obvious thing is. This doesn't look like all the other devices out there, which is a good thing. So if you want a phone that doesn't look the same as every other phone, that's coming out these days, this will help you stand out. If you don't mind the boxy appearance of it, I mean we've got all the galaxy notes out there, they're glass, all over the place front and back you even got iPhones, and they're also stepping up to having glass on front and back, so we are really not seeing many all-metal phones these days and still I like all metal phones.

They feel really sturdy very nice, and this is no exception. This is a very sturdy feeling phone, and it's got some heft to it. Yes, this phone is huge. As you can see, this is an iPhone 8 plus and the note 8, but this boxy appearance made sense in terms of the thermals they've, given it more room for heat, dissipation and more room for battery as well. So this has a four thousand William hour battery inside it, we've got a dual LED flash right here.

We've got two cameras once a telephoto lens and the other is a wide-angle lens. We've got the neat, racer insignia and Boston 2 here actually really liked this look. It's got a very nice clean design and appearance to it. We've just got some buttons here on the left. We've got a very well working fingerprint sensor right here on the right.

A megapixel camera here on the front on the bottom is pretty plain: we've got a USB-C charging port, also a microphone notice, there's no headphone jack that they do include a THX certified 24 bit DAC adapter. Here then, on the front, we have a 5.7 inch, TO display its quad HD, it's covered with Gorilla Glass 3, and it also supports of 220 Hertz refresh, which is just fantastic, and we will get into that. But one of my favorite things definitely are these speakers, so these babies are allowed. They've actually got a little of bass to them, and you can mess around with a Dolby Atmos equalization settings, which just adds even more character. Now I realize that this doesn't have any water, resistance or dust tightness, which is unfortunate, but isn't a dealbreaker for me, thankfully, one thing I'm noticing is that a lot of grime gets stuck in this little speaker.

Holes and I do wish from time to time that I could just flush these out with water, but you can't do that because this isn't water resistant, so say hello to skin particles pocket-lint whatever. That starts to look a little grimy after a while, but other than that, no physical complaints. So now another feature that stands out is this display, so we have a 5.7 inch, TO display and just off the bat. What I really like about it is that it's got really nice inky black. So it's got a good contrast ratio.

We've got nice color to this displace, actually fairly accurate, pretty close to RGB. Although a little on the cool side, they do say that it supports wide color. Once we get the Oreo update if applications are capable of displaying wide color and developers and Naval that to show you'll be able to see wide color, but right now, this is just RGB and actually looks good. Its funny people are saying: oh, it looks so vibrant and wonderful, and I'm like it's RGB the same color space. You guys complain about having all the time it just the colors.

Just look nice we're also going to be seeing wide color in the Netflix update, which should hit us really, really soon. Of course, you can tell that this display does not get very bright. Its peak brightness is maxing out at 300 nits around that area. So if you live somewhere, that's really sunny all the time, and you go outdoors. It gets a little hard to see but because I live in Washington, and it's never sunny here, it's always raining, always overcast pretty much.

It's been just fine outdoors. If you live somewhere really sunny you're going to have trouble. If you live somewhere, that's pretty overcast all the time. You're fine with it really now razor says that this display can also support HDR. So we're going to be getting an HDR update inside of Netflix and there's also going to be a Dolby 5.1 surround sound update too, but what's interesting is that, like I just mentioned this doesn't have very high peak brightness and if you're talking about HDR support, you should have a display they can get much brighter than that. So, even though this display is HDR capable I'm curious to see how HDR 10 content is going to look on this display now, my absolute favorite thing with this screen is that it supports up to 120 Hertz, and it's got a variable refresh rate as well.

So this is pretty darn cool. Now, of course, we got 60 Hertz, which is every other mobile display right now, so 60 frames per second, you see we have options for 60, 90 frames per second and 120, and this is what's really the game-changer with this phone. When you were scrolling about the interface, this is the best Android experience. The smoothest Android experience that I have ever had- and it just makes this phone a complete joy to use and what's really cool, is that underneath developer options they've, given you the ability to turn on a show, FPS counter, so you can see what the Refresh of the display actually is. So yes, the interface is extremely smooth, and you can thank 120 Hertz, but you can see that when I'm not touching the display, it's saying 15 Hertz, so it can go really down low for the Refresh, so you're not wasting unnecessary battery and as soon as I start touching the display.

You can see that it goes right up to that 120 Hertz, so that variable refresh is really a neat feature to have. What that variable, refresh is doing is matching the Refresh of the display with the GPU, so that helps to get rid of screen tearing and stutter. Now, even though this is the absolute smoothest, Android experiences that I have ever seen, we still get some frame drops here and there now that's whether there's loading still going on in the application, while I'm trying to scroll but for the most part, this thing just runs like butter. Now it isn't just the interface and basic everyday apps that are enjoying these higher frame rates. You can get these high frame rates in some games as well and more being updated over time to have that 60 frames per second lock or 30 frames per second lock lifted, and if you look at razors way site they're listing all these games that don't have a cap on them anymore, so that you can get some higher frame rates.

So I went and tested altar adventure, and this can run at a consistent, 120 frames per second, and this is where you really see a difference between 120 Hertz, gameplay and 60 Hertz gameplay. It just looks so much smoother and, of course, I went on this adventure to go and find games that look really smooth as well and Pok?mon Go looks fantastic. It just completely changed my experience playing Pok?mon Go being able to play at over 100 frames per second. So for me, this 120 Hertz display really is a game changer. The interface is smooth basic applications, look smooth, some games, look smooth and more are being supported.

I have noticed, though, that unless a game supports much higher frame rates like over 100 frames per second I, really don't see much difference in performance and smoothness in games, so for a lot of games. I just keep it at 60, Hertz and I've also noticed that some games that are normally smooth at 60 Hertz. If they're not compatible with 120 Hertz, they will start to stutter and not look so good. They end up with a lot of performance issues. I noticed that with ocean horn, for example, and a couple of other games- and they even make note on their site that, if it's an older game to keep it at 60 Hertz, because you could have some performance issues so with ocean horn I see that it will stutter it can get over that 60 frames per second cap, but it just really doesn't look very good.

So I just cap it at the 60 Hertz, and it goes right back to being smooth. So if you really like keeping the interface nice and smooth all the time at 120 Hertz, what I would recommend doing is going underneath game booster. You can see I have a list here, and this allows me to fine-tune how I want the games to run so for ocean horn. You see I've got max CPU max resolution, but I was able to cap just this game so that when I go to play ocean horn now it's going to be capped at 60 Hertz, but once I egg out of it. The display goes right back to its max 120 Hertz.

So that's really nice to have so having a display that can refresh at 120 frames per second and having applications that can honor. That just makes this feel so powerful as a device compared to other devices out there, and I think that that's going to help future-proof the feeling of this device, but we're looking at performance and aggregates to the other snapdragon 835 phones out there. It's really not any more powerful. Yes, this phone was built with thermals in mind, so we get good, sustained performance, especially for gaming, but don't expect miracles with this device. Sometimes it can pull a little ahead in benchmarks, but just in general, everyday use, I, don't really notice, really any difference unless we're talking about that refresh, we do get a gigabyte of RAM, though with this phone.

This is something that the other guys don't have unless we're looking at one plus. So it's fantastic with multitasking and, of course, having that much RAM makes me wonder if it really helps with the responsiveness of the phone as well. So I can keep a lot of apps open I can switch between apps very quickly. It's a stunning performing phone now to power all this craziness. We have a four thousand William hour battery inside this guy.

That is plenty and just throughout the day, I noticed that I can get through just fine without any issues whatsoever. Even when running this at 120 Hertz, all the time with 1440p. Of course, I can walk all that back and eke out a bit more battery, but my screen on times for having 1440p in 120 Hertz has been almost six hours of screen time. I've heard people saying all kinds of things for the batteries I'm saying the batteries are not so good. Some saying it's a really long-lasting battery.

For me, I'm in the camp of it's just fine in the beginning, I was having a little of battery drain issues for no reason it would drain all the way to dead overnight, still not sure what was causing that, but it's not doing it anymore, so good. For me, we've also got quick charge, 4.0 plus, so this can charge 50 percent in 15 minutes, I think that's the benchmark for this technology. So, needless to say, this charge is very quickly, so you've got a very large battery, and it charges very quickly. There's nothing to complain about here. We've got no inductive charging I, don't care, then, for just some other tidbits.

This is a phone that does not have a lot of bloatware on it. I really appreciate it. This is as close to vanilla Android as they could get. It. They've got the Nova Launcher on here.

It's Nova, Launcher, prime, that's my favorite lingerie I use it all the time anyway, there's a lot of customizability to it. It's working really great here, it's extremely responsive. Something to note is that this did come with some pre-installed games. That was for press only. No one else should be getting anything installed on here, except for things like game booster, but that's awesome as I've shown you earlier.

So we don't have any bloat. We don't have any gimmicky features with this phone. I've used everything so far. I have been a bit surprised, though, that this only has 64 gigabytes of internal storage. So, if they're boasting that this is a gaming phone or even a media phone- and you only have 64 gigabytes of internal storage, that seemed very odd to me.

What is nice, though, is that we've got an SD card slot right here, and you can actually use adoptable storage, so I put a 256 gigabyte decent SD card in here. You don't want to put a cheapo slow one in there. That's not going to do any favors with applications, but I can offload some apps now so some large games, for example, so it's technically expandable up to two terabytes you've got 64 gigabytes. Then you've got the adoptable storage and that essentially becomes a part of the phone. You can't take that SD card and use it anywhere else, it's being formatted to be used only with this phone now.

The last thing that I want to talk about is the camera, and this is kind of the clincher. This is kind of going to be the make-or-break for whether people are going to buy this phone and whether I can truly recommend it. As a lot of people have heard, they released this phone with a very basic camera application and not so stellar performance, although they did just update it and I, did take all of my pictures with the updated camera application. I still find this camera application to be a little slow, especially when taking HDR photos. It's got a little of a shutter lag.

There I sometimes find the photos to still not have as much contrast as I would like and still a little on the soft side, but in some photo comparisons it looks almost or even just as good as my iPhone 10. They also say that they're going to be making further updates over time to get this to perform better, giving it more features so still currently right now, I think this is a camera that needs work, I, think if you're going to go buy a smartphone, and you really need to have a good camera as that's the only camera you have in your pocket. This is probably not going to be the phone for you. We do have the telephoto lens in the wide-angle lens, so it's up to par with other phones, but we don't have optical image stabilization, which really helps with nighttime photos, for example, and in video it's pretty shaky. Looking in video there's, also no electronic image stabilization that I could see either.

This is a 1080p camera text on the razor phone, so walk into talking. So this is not the camera for me, of course you can go, and you can use another camera application. You can use the Google camera, for example, and I really haven't, had much chance to use this, but I'm going to and see how I feel over time, as some people are saying that they're getting better results with this, so I've been going through some Google camera settings and oh yeah I would definitely use this application instead, I see immediately video stabilization, so we do have electronic image stabilization now and that does help for video, especially, and I've, now even seeing an option to go between 30 or 60 frames per second, which we did not have with razors application. So overall we'll see what razor does with the camera over time. It's a bit too simplistic for me right now.

It's really take seriously well. When it comes to overall, would I buy this phone personally, and I can say yes, I would buy this phone personally would I be able to use it, as my only daily driver, probably not right now, because it doesn't have the camera all the works. That I need with the camera, but this is definitely one of the Android phones. That I would personally want to switch to I, always carry around an iPhone and an Android phone, so I would have no trouble keeping this one in my pocket just say alongside my iPhone 10, so now I've told you that I would buy this personally, but should you buy this personally if you're somebody who really counts on your camera, then probably not if you're somebody who wants really great performance and something different from heck? Yes, if you're nervous about this being a first generation product and not knowing about what's really going to happen with support down the line, then also, maybe not, but is this phone worth it for the price I think so, I really do, and I don't want them to go away. I hope they continue making products phone products, especially after seeing project Linda the prototype, where you could dock this and have this be the trackpad ? you're, a very razor-like computer doc, and that just looked so, so neat so for their first phone incredibly good job, Racer I have had a really nice time with this phone for a second generation.

I would hope it has some water resistance, for example, or at least ramp up the peak brightness on this guy, because it really does need it in some situations, although not all but other than that. Furthermore, I have had no complaints. So let me know what you guys think: I think that this is a good phone for anybody, not just gamers because of the performance and a little of future proofing as well. So this has been Erica the technology nerd likes to film stuff. Please write please comment and subscribe and don't forget to hit the notification bell if you'd like to see more reviews like this, because it's kind of hit-and-miss whether you're going to get notified.

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Source : Erica Griffin