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Motorola RAZR V3i Released (with iTunes)

Badandy said:
Are you joking? I know the US lags behind in mobile phones, but our industry in general? Besides being the richest country in the world and the world's only superpower, I guess we are so inferior to others...
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Comments like yours shows why we are viewed as the "ugly Americans".

In Europe GSM is is the standard that is used. The SIM card is all that is needed for a cell phone to be used across borders.

I amy be wrong, but IIRC in Europe i coming calls are charged to the one making the call. So who is the "super power"?

At the risk of moving this to the Political Forum, how can the US as the biggest "debtor" nation be considered a "super power"?

The US$ is in the tank compared to most currencies. When a 99 cent value meal at McDonald's costs $1.75US - there are problems in our economy.

The issue is that the laws we have on telecommunications in general support making the rich richer. Just look at news reports about the deregulation of the electric companies. We were told that it would lead to lower rates.

Just look at news reports about the DC and MD area; and you will see 30% to 75% increases in the electric bill.

After spending a week in Reykjavik and London, two weeks ago - I think I can provide a different look at the US superiority over other nations.

The mass transit in both Iceland and London was cleaner, newer, and much more on time than what I have seen in SF, DC, or Chicago.

You need to look at the fact that we are not the only "super power" any more. China is now a country to be recognized.

Super power does no longer mean the one that has the most nukes to end life as we know it.

It is time for us to realize that foreign investment in our ports (eeek, this coming from a liberal-conservative) or other businesses is not a bad thing at this point in time.

We lag in cellphone regulations in that why should I pay for incoming calls that I do not need or want. Or that I can not take my cellphone in most any other country? Without having just the "right" phone or paying higher fees?

In the end we are not the greatest nation, just the most arrogant nation on earth.
 
Never mind that in Iceland, it does not matter about the marital status of of woman with a child.

That horns seem to be missing from the cars. That on Friday and Saturday nights, the only cars you see on the road are taxis. No concerns about drunk drivers.

That a "super power" status means you are concerned on how you are perceived both socially and economically.
 
Chip NoVaMac said:
Comments like yours shows why we are viewed as the "ugly Americans".
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Ah yes, me an my shananigans.

I amy be wrong, but IIRC in Europe i coming calls are charged to the one making the call. So who is the "super power"?
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That makes sense. I guess we should define superpower as who incoming calls are charged to. It is all clear to me now...

At the risk of moving this to the Political Forum, how can the US as the biggest "debtor" nation be considered a "super power"?
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Good point. While that is true, I consider us a "super power" based on our military might (the best military in the world, albeit not the largest or best kill ratio) and of our influence in foreign affairs and the world's financial organizations. Not to mention our per capita GDP is $12,000 higher than any other country in the world.

The US$ is in the tank compared to most currencies. When a 99 cent value meal at McDonald's costs $1.75US - there are problems in our economy.
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My McDonald's 99 cent value meals cost 99 cents. Oh, and our currency is rebounding pretty quickly.

The issue is that the laws we have on telecommunications in general support making the rich richer.
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Just like everything else in the country I presume? Dang rich people, we should just take all their money and redistribute it...wait, we do, we have a graduated income tax and plethora of others that are aimed to do just that.

Just look at news reports about the deregulation of the electric companies. We were told that it would lead to lower rates.
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Me, in all my conservative/libertarian splendor happen to believe that businesses and our nation are better off with less government involvement. But the energy companies are in a predicament. However uninvolved the government tries to be, there are subsidies and taxes on the industry in general. Did you know that if there were no subsidies on hydroelectric power, or the power industry in general, we would have electricity bills 2x as high as they are now? But the government keeps them artificially low. So even if it goes up 30-50%, it is still lower than it should be based purely on economics. It's not these "evil industries" (please don't bring up Enron, I'm sick of people trying to use that as a characterization of every large company).



After spending a week in Reykjavik and London, two weeks ago - I think I can provide a different look at the US superiority over other nations.

The mass transit in both Iceland and London was cleaner, newer, and much more on time than what I have seen in SF, DC, or Chicago.
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Yes, the old mass transit arguement. Superiority isn't to be measured in mass transit, it is a completely different situation. Are we supposed to have the same system considering that our nation is bigger, our population is more spread out meaning we don't have the same population density as in London (which I, too, have visited)? Everything is so close in Europe they can use mass transit effeciently and it saves people money, but in the U.S. (most of it) it is just not viable.

You need to look at the fact that we are not the only "super power" any more. China is now a country to be recognized.

Super power does no longer mean the one that has the most nukes to end life as we know it.
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China is a world power, not a super power. They will become one, or they might already be edging their way there, but wouldn't that just be a given if you have over 1 billion people in your country? Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) I believe China is going to experience huge political unrest that will result in the overthrow of their regime due to the recent liberalization of the economy. How soon that will happen, nobody knows, but I believe it is inevitable.

It is time for us to realize that foreign investment in our ports (eeek, this coming from a liberal-conservative) or other businesses is not a bad thing at this point in time.
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Agreed. The Coast Guard still handles security regardless of who owns the ports.

We lag in cellphone regulations in that why should I pay for incoming calls that I do not need or want. Or that I can not take my cellphone in most any other country? Without having just the "right" phone or paying higher fees?
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I never said we didn't lag behind in the telecommunications industry.

In the end we are not the greatest nation, just the most arrogant nation on earth.
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Besides the fact that my very terse previous post probably reinforced the "arrogance" of our nation to other people, I do not believe we are. But what makes the "greatest nation"? If it is military might, we are the greatest nation, but "greatest" is a combination of intangibles like history, tradition, lifestyle, and other aspects of life that cannot be calculated.


On a final note, I used "super power" purely in objective terms. We have the largest average GDP, we have huge influence all around the world in investing, companies, and financial institutions, and other things of that sort.

Additionally, being a super power is more commonly now measured in the number of nuclear-powered "supercarriers" a nation has. The United States has 12, and the huge, unmatched military supremacy of the U.S. to other nations is why I made my previous assertion.


Great, I expect flames :)


Oh, and please don't think that I think we have nothing to learn from other European countries. (enough negatives there?)
 
I have a question, If I buy the V3i Razr off ebay, will it work for me in Canada through Bell Mobility?? I'm a bit confused as to how international released phones work in countries where they have not yet been released.
 
If you go to the store, you'll find plenty of phones that match your description, not sure what it has to do with the RAZR?

Actually, the RAZR is less full-featured than other high-end phones. It's design and thin profile are its main attractions.

And it's reception is fine IMO, better than the previous SE and Siemens phones I had (not that I consider Motorola any better, they're probably all roughly equal.) On the whole, reception quality isn't a big priority for these phone makers IMO, since it's hard to actually quantitiate reception quality, or advertise it as a selling point in a store. People would rather pick the phone with the 3 MP camera or whatever...

rikers_mailbox said:
Now back on topic: I hate the RAZR. It's got too much going on... why, oh why, can't I just have a phone?!? Maybe one that actually works! So often these phones with cameras, browsers, games, toasters, etc. don't work as advertized... not to mention the lousy reception.
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madmaxmedia said:
On the whole, reception quality isn't a big priority for these phone makers IMO, since it's hard to actually quantitiate reception quality, or advertise it as a selling point in a store. People would rather pick the phone with the 3 MP camera or whatever...
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As an electrical engineer that helps design cell phones for a living, I have to take issue with the first part of this statement. Reception quality is extremely important for several reasons:
  1. Even though though your voice is digitized and sent as packets of data today in any digital phone network, the reception, decompression, and reconstruction of the audio is done in as close to real time as possible to minimize latency. There is no time to go back and request missing or corrupt audio data be retransmitted.
  2. Part of what determines the transmit power level in a cell phone is the strength of the received signal. A phone with poor reception will thus erroneously use more power than necessary to transmit, with a corresponding decrease in battery life.
  3. In the case of CDMA/WCDMA, cells "breathe", i.e., virtually expand and contract based on the number of active calls in the cell. As a consequence of item #2, phones with poor reception will be the most likely to have their calls abruptly dropped at the edge of a cell.
Put together, a phone with poor reception reflects poorly upon the service provider, not just the phone manufacturer. Since the providers purchase 95% of the phones on the market (which are then resold as part of service plans), we have every incentive to wring as much performance out of a given design as is possible.
 
macbookAPRIL1 said:
I have a question, If I buy the V3i Razr off ebay, will it work for me in Canada through Bell Mobility?? I'm a bit confused as to how international released phones work in countries where they have not yet been released.
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No. The V3i is a GSM phone, and will not operate on Bell Mobility's CDMA network. A V3c or newly announced V3m will, however, but then you'll lose the iTunes client. A no-win situation, I'm afraid.
 
Misplaced Mage said:
As an electrical engineer that helps design cell phones for a living, I have to take issue with the first part of this statement. Reception quality is extremely important for several reasons:
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Hey Mage,

Thanks for the info, it was very interesting.

I think you misinterpreted my post. I didn't mean that reception quality is unimportant, I meant that it does not seem as important to the cell phone makers in terms of differentiating their phones against the competition.

Besides the extra features and designer looks, obviously a phone is first and foremost used for voice calls. So having a phone that does this well is important. It's just very hard for consumers to really tell which are good and which are bad in the store. OTOH, you can read full spec lists that tell you how many songs it can play, how many megapixels the camera is, the exact web and movie features it can do, etc...

If there was some basic measure of reception quality (say from 1 to 10, or 1 to 100), that would be awesome IMO. Especially when shopping for a new phone, you could look for one with a better rating if you there are local 'trouble spots' for you. I used to drop calls a lot in certain areas where I live, that actually stopped happening when I got a RAZR for Christmas. Maybe there's even better, but I have no idea-

Or a person is better enabled to decide what mix of features is best for them. Maybe they want the smallest phone possible, as long as it provides a certain acceptable reception quality, etc. One can do this when shopping for say cars or notebook computers. But we can't with cell phones.
 
The problem is that you're dealing with radio. Manufacturers can (and do) make all sorts of comparisons under laboratory conditions, where we can control everything -- right down to the humidity of the air in some tests. The problem is that we can't control the real world so well. ;) Some reception factors include:
  • Weather (precipitation can be a problem at times, so is ice on a base station's antennas)
  • Multipath, i.e., the signal reflects off objects en route (buildings, cars, trucks, etc.) and interferes with itself
  • Competing service providers sharing the same base station tower for their antennas (increasingly common)
  • Base station software's "idiosyncrasies" with our phone software at the protocol level. All the major carriers are a hodgepodge of hardware and software due to acquisitions, supplier bidding, etc. Interoperation testing is something you don't hear about much, except when something slips through.
  • The person next to you chatting on his cell phone
  • The badly RF shielded PC down the hall
  • The other 57 people chatting in the cell you can't see
The Verizon "Can you hear me now?" guy is no joke. That sort of thing goes on constantly -- I've ridden and made the test calls on a few road loops myself. But there are inevitable engineering and software compromises, and a phone that works well for one person in one area may not work as well for another in a different area. The general advice is still, "Use what works best for you."

<shrug> If designing a cell phone were simple, it wouldn't take the experienced manufacturers 6-12 months to design a new one. That's why I cast such a skeptical eye on Apple developing their own cell phone internally: far more likely that they'd subcontract the hardware, do the UI themselves, and have input on -- but not total control of -- of the phone's OS. Just like every other MVNO.
 
Hi Mage,

Thanks again. I do understand that reception quality can depend on a whole multitude of local factors. Which is why when someone says Phone X is the absolute best, or Provider A is horrible, I take it with a few grains of salt.

But, shouldn't be possible to devise some sort of standardized test to measure reception strength of different phones?

For example, there is a new standard to measure how long various digital cameras last with their standard batteries. And of course there's the EPA test for car gas mileage. I don't think the tests are going to tell you exactly how the product will perform in your hands, but it should give you a comparative basis to evaluate different products.

The funny thing is that I'm pretty fine with phones as they are, and have no complaints. I was originally just responding to someone else's complaint about the RAZR... :)

Misplaced Mage said:
The problem is that you're dealing with radio. Manufacturers can (and do) make all sorts of comparisons under laboratory conditions, where we can control everything -- right down to the humidity of the air in some tests. The problem is that we can't control the real world so well. ;) Some reception factors include:
  • Weather (precipitation can be a problem at times, so is ice on a base station's antennas)
  • Multipath, i.e., the signal reflects off objects en route (buildings, cars, trucks, etc.) and interferes with itself
  • Competing service providers sharing the same base station tower for their antennas (increasingly common)
  • Base station software's "idiosyncrasies" with our phone software at the protocol level. All the major carriers are a hodgepodge of hardware and software due to acquisitions, supplier bidding, etc. Interoperation testing is something you don't hear about much, except when something slips through.
  • The person next to you chatting on his cell phone
  • The badly RF shielded PC down the hall
  • The other 57 people chatting in the cell you can't see
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Well, if you want to get technical... :cool:

Phones usually have a test mode ("test screen", "field test display", etc.) where the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) is shown along with other technical information. This is the power level of the received, on-channel signal as measured by the phone itself. A typical CDMA phone is required by the carriers to pick up a -106dBm radiated signal (i.e., through the air to the phone's antenna, not conducted by a shielded line like cable TV), but this number is usually exceeded by design (-107dBm or less) to allow for variations in manufacture. Comparing the RSSI of two phones side-by-side in a weak signal area will give you some idea of which is more sensitive, but only an idea. For an better test you need to know the exact output power of the signal the phone is receiving so you know how accurate the phone's RSSI number really is. The only way to do this is to put the phone in a Faraday cage to eliminate all other spurious signals and use a carefully calibrated transmitter (I was really impressed when the Mythbusters went to this extent recently in seeing if cell phones interfered with aviation electronics).

But there's that qualifier I had : "...this number (-106dBm) is usually exceeded by design (-107dBm or less) to allow for variations in manufacture." There's always going to be some variation due to the tolerances in the manufacturing process of a phone and those of each of its constituent components -- and the variations in any given circuit are cumulative. We have to accept those tolerances we can't improve, and design around them. But while most of the phones will come in under -107dBm, there are going to be a few where the stars aligned and go another couple of dBm down, and a few where the stars crossed and just barely meet the -106dBm requirement.

We could design even more sensitive receivers, or ones we could manufacture to even tighter tolerances, but such high precision gets very expensive very quickly and in the end wouldn't help the vast majority of users. Or we could go back to putting big, extendable antennas on the phones instead of the ridiculously small, internal antennas everyone wants these days. "Ye cannae break the laws o' physics!" :D
 
Is the Razor V3i still not available in the USA? Im looking to upgrade (have cingular) but it appears they didn't have the V3i, just the V3. So i went further and i didn't find a carrier that sells the iTunes enabled version of the RAZR. Anyone know if they do sell in the USA and i just missed it or what? Is the plain V3 the US alternative? :confused:
 
Misplaced Mage said:
We could design even more sensitive receivers, or ones we could manufacture to even tighter tolerances, but such high precision gets very expensive very quickly and in the end wouldn't help the vast majority of users. Or we could go back to putting big, extendable antennas on the phones instead of the ridiculously small, internal antennas everyone wants these days. "Ye cannae break the laws o' physics!" :D
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That's awesome, thanks for the post. It's always good to learn a little more... ;)

In general, are most phones nowadays reasonably close in reception strength? How do today's smaller, feature-packed phones compare to the bricks of yesteryear?

I always hear people say "Phone A sucks!" or "Phone B has by far the best range,", etc. But almost all these sorts of stories are completely anecdotal.

I do find, though, my RAZR consistently performing better around my home than my old Sony T610.
 
Misplaced Mage said:
No. The V3i is a GSM phone, and will not operate on Bell Mobility's CDMA network. A V3c or newly announced V3m will, however, but then you'll lose the iTunes client. A no-win situation, I'm afraid.
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what about in the US? will the V3i work here?
 
madmaxmedia said:
That's awesome, thanks for the post. It's always good to learn a little more... ;)

In general, are most phones nowadays reasonably close in reception strength? How do today's smaller, feature-packed phones compare to the bricks of yesteryear?

I always hear people say "Phone A sucks!" or "Phone B has by far the best range,", etc. But almost all these sorts of stories are completely anecdotal.

I do find, though, my RAZR consistently performing better around my home than my old Sony T610.
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Reasonably close? I'd have to say yes, just out of the requirements of the carriers. There are always exceptions, though. You may remember Motorola's V810 from a year or two ago: Verizon had it in testing for almost a year, and ultimately decided not to carry it. Other US carriers did pick it up, so it certainly met FCC requirements. While the antenna in its camera's field of view was certainly a problem, rumors have it that there was a problem with aGPS reception that didn't meet Verizon's specs no matter what Motorola did to the phone.

And that a cell phone is capable of picking up a -130dBm GPS signal these days for FCC 911 requirements should speak to the improvements in reception since the days of the Brick. :D It takes a number of tricks to do it, like turning off practically everything in the phone to reduce noise while it's taking a location fix, and have the network do the bulk of the number-crunching in order to take advantage of a few shortcuts, but it actually works quite well.

One final thing that has a major effect on reception? How the user holds the phone. Putting a finger on or immediately next to the antennas(s) -- wherever it's/they're located in a phone -- is terrible for transmission and reception. It screws up the impedance match between the antenna(s) and the air, and is difficult to characterize well. And as much as people like the look and heft of real metal in a phone, it needs to be thoroughly grounded to prevent it from interfering with the real antenna(s) in a phone.
 
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