Verizon Droid Razr Maxx

The Verizon Droid Razr Maxx came pre-installed with Gingerbread (Android 2.3). I was kind of bummed that it did not come with Ice Cream Sandwich (aka ICS, or Android 4.0) installed, but I was easily able to determine that there was an update available. This update brought the 4.0.3 version of Ice Cream Sandwich to the phone and automatically increased its appeal several times over. The menus scrolled smoothly, apps loaded quite quickly thanks to the dual-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A9 processor, and PowerVR SGX540 GPU in the phone along with the 1 GB of RAM made it quite powerful. I loaded up all of my favorite apps: Skype, Trillian, etc. I was, however, a little annoyed with the bloat that Verizon decided to
include, but that comes with any carrier-subsidized phone. The phone took any app I could throw at it flawlessly and worked great. I ran many applications and could not get this phone to slow down or crash; I am sure someone can, but I doubt a normal user would ever hit that point. Motorola’s Blur did not slow the phone down any that I noticed; I have had other Motorola phones that had Blur and they didn’t fare so well, but the Droid Razr Maxx chugged on like a champ. Aside from this difference in fluidity, the experience with the software on the phone was pretty typical of any ICS Motorola phone with Blur.

Hardware

As I mentioned, the Droid Razr Maxx packs a powerful dual-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A9 processor with SGX540 GPU and 1 GB of RAM. The processor and GPU can handle any application out on the Google Play Store as of now, and, more than likely, for quite some time to come. The Droid Razr Maxx’s biggest selling point is its whopping 3300mAh Lithium Ion battery, which boasts a massive 380 hours of standby time and 1290 Minutes (21.5 Hours) of talk time. From my personal experience, it gets very close to these projections even in the worst scenarios. The phone has a SIM card slot on the right side next to the micro SD card slot. The phone comes pre-installed with a 16 GB micro SD card, but it can handle up to a 32 GB card. The back camera on this phone is very good, coming in at 8 MP; in my own comparison, it was almost spot-on with the iPhone 4S camera in the tests I did. The rear-facing camera is capable of recording HD video in full 1080p and looks very good. From what I can tell, it is very close to the iPhone 4S in video quality. The front-facing camera is 1.3 MP and capable of recording HD 720p video. The front-facing camera works quite well for Skype, Google+ Hangouts, and any other situation requiring a webcam. The phone is only slightly thicker than its little brother the Droid Razr — the additional space was necessary, more than likely, due to the bigger battery. Over all, the Droid Razr Maxx feels very comfortable in my hand; the back of the phone has a textured feel to it, which helps with keeping a firm grip to avoid those awkward “oops” moments when lesser phones seem to succumb to gravity’s pull — and break — without warning.
The phone’s overall construction is quite solid; it doesn’t feel like plastic in my hand. The Droid Razr Maxx also has a mini HDMI port on the top of it (mini HDMI to HDMI adapter required). I picked up a cheap adapter on Amazon for under a buck and hooked it up to my 42″ 1080p TV — it looked very good. Everything was quite smooth and looked great; videos that were encoded at DVD quality played quite well with no artifacts or blurriness. Lower quality video looked okay enough, but it was nothing to write home about.

Call Quality and 4G/3G Speeds

What would a phone be if it couldn’t make calls? Well, this phone does that quite well — even in the worst areas of coverage. I recently took a trip from upstate New York to Detroit, Michigan via an Amtrak train and decided to test out the phone en route. The coverage along the way varied from full 4G LTE to one bar of 1x and everywhere in between. I took a number of phone calls at various signal levels and all of them went through surprisingly well. I was really surprised at how clear the call was with barely a bar of signal on a fast-moving train. I also decided to test out the rate of data transfer on the Droid Razr Maxx, because that’s what a smartphone does best, no? I tested the 4G at full signal and got an impressive 22.3 Mbps down and 14.5 Mbps up using the Speedtest.net Android application and the closest server to where I was at the time. Throughout the trip, I very rarely lost data connection altogether. The phone seemed to keep the data connection up even when it was only 1x data with a low signal. The speeds I experienced were quite good for being on a train going through all kinds of terrain. I tested the 3G data with full signal and got 3.2 Mbps down and 1.2 Mbps up — not too shabby, if I say so myself. All in all, this phone seems to stay connected very well; of course, your coverage may vary.