I’ve been using my newest toy, a Motorola Razr V3c cell phone (in hot pink—yeah, right), for about a month.  So far I love the phone.  Its ultra-thin design makes it easy to slip in my pocket, so easy that I often forget that its there!  It has a large, easy to read screen, and a 1.3 megapixel camera.  Sound quality is very good, and it comes with all of the features I need (such as a calculator, calendar, etc.).

I got the phone despite RIT’s Verizon rep’s opinion of it.  His opinion was that it was too fat.  I kind of agree, although I’m willing to trade width for depth–the thinness of the phone is what really sold me on it.  I switched to Verizon because I was sick of the lousy service I was getting from Sprint.  Working at RIT, I am also elligible for a 10% service discout and discouts on accessories, so that helped sweeten the deal.  Since most everyone I know has Verizon service as well, the free IN calling will save me lots of minutes, too.

I also purchased software that lets me connect the phone’s USB port to a computer.  With this software I can backup my contacts (which is worth the $30 price tag, IMHO) and sync my Outlook calendar to the phone.  I should be able to download my pictures and upload MP3 files as ringtones as well, but Verizon has conveniently blocked those features on the phone, forcing customers to use their service to send pictures (for a price, of course) and to buy
their ringtones.  I’ve heard there are hacks that you can do to the phone to get around this, but I haven’t tried.

My only complaint about the Razr is that the small batter doesn’t have a long standby life.  If I forget to plug the phone in, I’ll loose about half of my battery charge overnight.  With my past phones I’d lose 25% at the most.  So far service has been much imporoved over Sprint.  I don’t think I’ve seen my phone go out of range once (compared to Sprint, where I’d lose service in certain parts of my apartment).

The true test of the phone will come in about two weeks when I verture up to the Adirondacks for the weekend.  Up there, saying service is spotty is an overstatement, and I’ve noticed that only Verizon customers seem to be able to get anything.  We’ll see how this phone does then.