Overview of RAZER Smartphone

After acquiring the new smartphone company “Nextbit” earlier this year rumors where coming up about razer making their first smartphone. A “gaming” smartphone to be precise. And.. Here it is ! Meet the new razer phone the ultimate gaming phone of 2017. This is A.R.M from frenzyweb360 and today let’s talk about the razer phone…

A short disclaimer though . We didn’t actually get to try the phone so this will be mostly based on other reviewers experience with the phone.

The specs: let’s look at the spec sheet at a glance

Display 5.72-inch IGZO LCD 2560x1440

120Hz, Wide Color Gamut (WCG)

Corning Gorilla Glass 3

Processor Qualcomm Snapdragon 835

RAM 8GB dual channel (LPDDR4, 1600

Storage 64GB UFS

Expansion microSD upto 2 TB

Battery 4000 mAh lithium-ion battery

Qualcomm QuickCharge 4.0+

Rear Cameras 12MP f/1.75 wide-angle

12MP f/2.6 telephoto

Front Camera 8MP f/2.0, fixed focus

Sound Stereo Front facing speakers

Dual Amplifiers

Audio Adapter with THX certified DAC

Security One-touch fingerprint sensor

Size 158.5 x 77.7 x 8 mm ( 6.24 x 3.06)

Design and build quality:

The design is pretty same as the nextbit robin but with some exceptions. So it’s an all metal build with a complete matte black coating and the razer logo behind the phone . The matte black theme almost makes it identical with razer’s gaming laptop line ups. But it looks stealthy yet beautiful and you don’t need to worry about your fingerprints on this thing . In a word it looks clean ! The volume buttons are the only gripes though , they feel plasticky and it’s hard to find them without looking . The fingerprint reader and unlock button being the sane thing at the side of the phone is pretty cool .It doesn’t have a bezel-less edge to edge display but for a good reason ! The speaker grills take up the space and a bezel less display won’t be pretty satisfying to game on anyways . Rather the upper and lower bezels would help providing a better grip while gaming (just to have a place to rest your thumbs on while gaming). The phone is pretty big , almost the size of a pixel 2xl ! But its brick like solid design is petty good to hold onto.  But it might suffer a bit In the 2017 smartphone market in the design category .

Display:

Display is one of the main attraction on this thing . It has an IGZA LCD display made by SHARP and it comes with 120hz refresh rate ! 120hz refresh rate was seen before on the iPad pro but it’s the first time to bee seen on a smartphone . And as of now oled displays can’t handle 120hz refresh rate that’s why razer chose to go for a lcd panel. But nevertheless it looks pretty good as well . But the higher refresh rate makes the user experience on this device buttery smooth . The refresh rate keeps changing by itself to preserve battery life . Out of the box the highest refresh rate is set to medium but u can obviously take it upto 120hz . The display also supports Razer's "Ultramotion" technology, which is similar to Nvidia's GSync and allows the screen's refresh rate to sync up with the smartphone's graphics system.

Sound:

First of all they chose to not put the headphone jack but rather they provided a thx certified usb-c dongle or adapter *whatever u wanna call it* with a DAC built in.. Now I don’t know how much u can trust on that thx certification but I think they made up for the headphone jack with a pair of awesome speakers on the phone with dual amplifiers. The speakers are dolby atmos certified and  it’s probably the best phone speaker out there right now .You can use the inbuilt dolby atmos settings to play with the equalizer a bit and use the different options like gaming mode , movie , music etc preset eq settings to spice up the sound experience . The speakers are great and it creates very less distortion even at the highest volume . So the large speaker grills on the bottom and top are definitely worth it .

Performance:

The hardware and software decisions on this thing were totally gaming oriented but at the same time it also enhanced the overall day to day use . It comes with the snapdragon 835 cpu with 8 gigs of ram . It has 64gigs of inbuilt storage and expandable storage of upto 2TB !  Now razer claims to have invented a new  cooling solution for the phone by spreading the heat throughout the whole body of the phone using their redesigned heatsink. The display animations are smooth as heck and its pretty close to stock android to be honest . The phone comes with almost no bloatware and rather than putting some developer skin on it razer rather put the nova prime launcher in it from the start and that obviously gives you a lot of space for customizability. But it comes with a bit of customization from razer as you would notice on some app icons here and there but still it looks really nice and clean .So the user experience on this thing is gonna be one of the greatest .

Side note: razer promised a oreo update at the beginning of 2018 so you don’t need to worry about the phone still running nougat. The phone is almost like stock android experience so oreo will probably suit it very well.

Battery:

It’s a gaming phone with a 120hz refresh rate ! Its obviously gonna consume a lot energy right? Fear not cause razer backed it up with a 4000 mAh battery and also provided qualcomm quickcharge 4.0+ ! Which can charge 0-50% of your phone in just 35 minutes !

Gaming:

Obviously it’s made for gamers so gaming is the phone’s main center of attraction. With it’s 120hz refresh rate and powerful specs the gaming experience on this thing is amazing . The refresh rate keeps adjusting itself even in game to give a smooth experience while optimizing the battery life as well . But there are not a handful of games out yet optimized for 120hz gaming but since razer is constantly working with gaming companies various titles are heard to be coming up very soon that will be optimized for 120hz gaming .

Camera:

Now razer didn’t talk much about the camera as that wont be the main point of this phone but its gonna be decent I presume . So at the back we have a dual camera setup with  12MP f/1.75 wide-angle and 12MP f/2.6 telephoto lens and at the front a Front Camera with 8MP f/2.0 . They kept the camera ui pretty simple and no fancy filters and stuff.

It’s pretty rare to see a new smartphone company make something so good but razer is a experienced company who knows what they actually do and they have a huge fanbase around the world as well so I guess many people would actually spend a fortune for this phone ! And how much is it u ask ? Well it’s price will be 699$ and those who pre ordered it for 1st of November got a limited edition razer phone with the green razer logo on the back and not the black logo, as an exception.

With the incredible unboxing experience with this phone as a cherry on top, I think this razer phone will be a pretty good contender for the best smartphone of this year . And built for gamer it is ..

This was A.R.M , stay tuned with frenzyweb360 and I will see you on the next one .