I managed to buy a new phone for myself, but unfortunately, without realizing what I was getting into.
I walked to the phone store and picked up a RAZR V3a for around $204. I thought it was a pretty decent deal. After all, I’d have a cool phone like the V3m I used to own. And to boot, it was black!
Unfortunately, that’s where the fun ended. Upon flipping the back cover open, I noticed something that shocked me a bit–no miniSD slot. WTF? But that was just the tip of the iceberg. But this one stings quite a bit because memory card slots are a good way to future-proof yourself with phone expansions.
Once I fired up the phone, I noticed quite a few things that angered me. Here is a summary:
No Airplane Mode. Oh, this hurts. I have to totally shut the phone down if I enter a sensitive place such as a hospital. This angers me quite a bit, because a phone without service can be useful as a camera or for taking down numbers. Even better yet, I live in a place where I get no cell reception, and my phone keeps trying to connect to the network, thus running the battery down twice as fast. With airplane mode, I could fix this.
Crooked and washed out outer display. Remember the 3G iPod nanos and their display issues (The case and the screen not lining up)? Same here. The outer display is crooked in the casing. Not only that, this screen is supposed to display color, and it looks like grayscale to me because all the color looks all washed-out. The V3m never did this to me.
No EV-DO. Seriously. WTF. The V3m supported this. Instead, the only thing you get with the V3a is 1xRTT. I use my phone for web browsing all the time, and EV-DO would have helped.
Quiet Speaker. I can’t hear the speaker when the phone is in my pocket. The V3m I could hear easily. The V3a simply isn’t loud at all. Hell, my previous Nokia 2865i was louder than the V3a (At a cost of sound quality, however). I’ve even boosted the volume of my ringtones in Audacity and it doesn’t help.
Lower internal memory. While the V3a and V3m are pretty much on parity in eachother looking at total memory, The V3a, for some unknown reason swallows more internal memory for it’s own uses. When I got my phone, only 25MB was available for personal use. Put that in contrast with the V3m, which had 40MB for personal use. And the thing which really sucks is there is no way to expand the memory.
All in all, I do like the phone, but I think I’m going to accept Sprint’s offer to buy my phone back and go for the RAZR2 v9m.
