Motorola RAZR2 V9

The Motorola RAZR V9 has an air of familiarity about it and you could be forgiven that you have seen it before. That's because the V9 is identical to its RAZR2 V8 counterpart in terms of looks. It has exactly the same flip mechanism, keypad and svelte durable structure as the previous addition to the successful RAZR series.

Before opening the handset you'll be struck by the size of the external screen which comes in at around 2", much bigger than the exterior screens found on the majority of clamshell handsets. As well as displaying the usual, time signal strength and battery life displays, the exterior screen also boasts some neat touch sensitive music controls, so you can pause and skip tracks without having to open up the handset. Whilst this control mechanism works well and manages to make the navigation from track to track relatively seamless, full access to the music player functions is, unfortunately, limited, so if you want to change tracks beyond the current album or playlist, then you'll have to open up the old handset.

Another nice innovation comes in the shape of the 'CrystalTalk' ambient noise reduction technology which makes voice calls much much clearer. CrystalTalk automatically accounts for ambient noise, boosting audio volume when you are on a call, so if you are in a busy pub, at a train station or are in any type of crowd, the RAZR2 V9 will automatically adjust volume and audio clarity accordingly, thus avoiding any embarrassing Dom Joly situations.

Motorola should be applauded for actually producing and innovating on the curiously oft-neglected 'phone' aspect of a mobile phone – so many handsets seem to get way with having pretty average voice call volume simply because of the additional multimedia features.

That's not say that the V9 does not have some decent multimedia features of its own. Unlike the Motorola V8 the V9 is HSDPA compatible which will enable you to connect to the internet at near broadband speeds, and the music player has a decent level of audio output and supports all the major file formats (MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WAV, MIDI & XMF).

Unfortunately, if you were hoping to take some high definition pics with your phone, then RAZR V9 wont be for you. It's 2 Megapixel 8 x digital zoom camera although pretty decent, doesn't stand up to the photographic power of other phones these days. The zoom function works really well, allowing you to get up close and personal, but with no autofocus or flash, don’t be expecting to take anything memorable unless in a well lit environment. That said, you can record video footage of up to 1 hour in MPEG4 format which is surprisingly fluid, if not exactly the best quality. The camera also allows for 3G video calls to be made.

The V9 includes 45MB of internal memory and it also possesses a microSD card slot that is upgradeable up to a heftier 2GB. This will give you plenty of room to store some tracks and pics.

At the end of the day, the Motorola RAZR2 V9 is a decent phone with an attractive, stylish design, ideal for those who primarily want a phone (who will no doubt love the Crystal Talk aspect) and for whom secondary multimedia functions are less of a concern.