AWAKE & DREAMING: I'm The MotoStar!!

I have always had an obsession for flip phones or as they seem to call them now - clamshells! I always dug the styles & the shapes and thought that the coolest kind of cellphones to own are flipphones/clamshells, although the 5 cell phones that I at one time or the other have had have not been of that kind (Motorola T190, Samsung R220, Nokia 1100, Nokia 3310 & Sony Ericsson K500i). Well, now I own one myself and am feeling quite happy about it. I just went and exchanged my Sony Ericsson K500i and paid the rest for a snazzy, sexy, ultra-cool, futuristic looking Motorola RAZR V3i. Barely an hour old it is sitting in front of me, like a prized Alaskan Malamute or an expensive Persian cat (they are of the colour purple as well) and awaiting it's master while I type this. On a Sunday of all days, I was able to go to buy it at Penta-Menaka and even though they did not have it in stock with them, they got it for me from a friendly-rival shop across the street in GCDA shopping complex.

The Motorola RAZR ("RAZR" pronounced "razor"), at 13.9 mm thick, is a thin clamshell camera phone, with the most popular V3 model released in November 2004. The phone was initially regarded as an exclusive fashion phone, with a high price of $500 with service agreement. However, in 2005 the phone entered the mass-market as a mid-priced phone. As of February 2006, the phone markets in the UK for £89.99, in Australia for $299 from Virgin Mobile, in Mexico for $2999 from Telcel, in Canada for $449.99 (99.99 with a 3-year contract), and in the United States for $99.99 after rebate (from T-Mobile and Cingular Wireless, the original US carrier for the RAZR), making it an upper end-budget phone. Two of the phone's most prominent features are its thinness and the positioning of its internal antenna at the base below the mouthpiece.

The RAZR V3i is the successor to the RAZR. It has excellent quality camera & video, mp3 capabilities, bluetooth, access to the web - it will do everything except shave my beard for me; even though ironically, it's name is RAZR!! It addresses some of the faults of the original V3, including a better (1.23 megapixel) camera with 8x digital zoom, support on some models for iTunes, a slightly better external display, and support for TransFlash/microSD cards. The phones looks have also been slightly tuned, and the initial colour is brushed metal. The phone was initially rumored to be the "Razr 2". This designation, however, turned out to be incorrect, as Motorola currently has a 'real' Razr 2 in the works.