Razer Phone 2 Detailed HONEST Review! By GizmoSlipTech

Welcome to my review of you razor phone too, we are looking at the new design, new internals new camera new display, light-up logo. There are all kinds of new features on this bad boy. Razors goal this year seems to not just be making a gaming smartphone, but to make a top smartphone one that hopefully can compete with the likes of the note 9 and the Galaxy devices, as well as potentially undercut those phones in price. Now before we dive into this review. I just want to ask that if you're new to the channel please consider subscribing and if you enjoy these reviews, go down there and hit that like button. Let's go ahead and get into this review now.

The biggest overall design change is the glass back in oh, it's so smooth and so nice to hold in the hand. Yes, it's a boxy shape, but now, when it's in your hand, it feels perfect, and it feels I think a lot more premium than the previous Racer phone that just had an aluminum back. Of course, there's the downside that now you have two surfaces to break but of course, there's also the upside with it being glass. Now we can have wireless charging which we do have in this phone, though there are issues with the wireless charging that you need to be aware of. Now the wireless charging on this device works perfectly fine with the existing Racer wireless charging dock, which they provided to me for this test.

Now this device is not key. Wirelessly certified, and I was very confused because I thought it was, but it's not so here's the thing. When Racer redesigned this phone they had the same sized battery life, they added an RGB light-up logo. They added a vapor chamber on the inside. They added all these new features and kept the existing ones, but they still added wireless charging and in order to fit that wireless charging, they had to place it in a lower part of the device.

Now the trick here is when I set my device on my Samsung wireless charger. It did not charge the device. I was going wet in the world when placing it in vertically. It is too low to receive a charge, at least on this Samsung charger, and when you put it in horizontally, it is too far to the side to receive that charge. But if you scoot it over, we are now getting a charge.

It's not that big of a deal, but you should know about it before you make this purchase now. This customizable RGB light-up logo is really cool, and it looks perfect. It is a little hard to see in daylight, but indoors. It really does pop. Furthermore, it is very noticeable- and it's not just for glam, there's, also a notification functionality to it'll glow red.

If you get a YouTube notification or a Gmail notification, it'll glow blue. If you get a Facebook notification yellow for a Snapchat, and you can customize these settings in the notifications section of the phone now. This is a really cool feature on paper. But for me, whenever I put my device on my desk, for example, I'm always going to be putting it on the wireless charger, which means it has to have the back facing down, which means I'm, not gonna, see the LED notification light anyway. I think the main situation when you might use it is when you set your phone down in a random place like let's say you're getting in the shower.

You set it down outside the shower. You can then see what type of notification you get from a distance there's a handful of situations where it will be useful. But for me the vast majority of the time is it's. It's a cool gimmick, not particularly useful, though now the internals in this bad boy are the top-of-the-line Android specs we've got the Snapdragon 845 8 gigs of ram the Arena 630 GPU 64, gigs of storage, with a micro SD card for up to 512 gigs of additional storage. Of course, that will keep going up as micro SD cards.

Keep getting larger. Another major upgrade is the new cell phone receiver in this bad boy. From my experience, it is on par with the reception. I was getting with the Galaxy devices and with the iPhone 10s of Mac's. I was able to take calls and receive calls without having dropped signal in my house, which was happening with my original RAZOR phone now.

Another big deal is that the Razor phone 2 will support Verizon when this thing comes out, so it's going to support a lot more bands and a lot more functionality for those of you that are on different carriers. The first razor phone worked well with T-Mobile, but this one should work better with pretty much all the carriers out there. Now we did a speed test with the razor phone versus the iPhone 10s Mac's and the Galaxy Note 9, and the razor phone was much quicker when opening daily apps. That is, the vast majority of the things you'll be doing on your smartphone unless you're a heavy gamer, or maybe a heavy entertainment person where you just sit there in one app and just consume a lot of content which I suppose that's. What a lot of us will do anyway.

Now, when the OnePlus sixty comes out, I will be doing a speed test comparison between the razor phone 2 and the OnePlus 60, we'll see which of those two phones is faster in my speed test. I'm actually really curious to find out now, despite the fact that this thing has the exact same channels as the Galaxy Note 9 running apps, opening apps scrolling through window scrolling up and down Internet there's through your feeds, whatever you're doing it is just so much smoother with a razor phone a hundred and twenty Hertz display. The same thing is true of the original razor phone as it is of this phone. A big part of this is the optimization. This is running essentially stock, Android with the Nova Launcher and a couple of apps from Racer, such as their Racer cortex, which is a new gaming software management tool.

Racer cortex has game suggestions as well as managing your game library. You can launch your games from rage, their cortex and the biggest most important feature is you can adjust the target FPS for your games so that you can hopefully hit the 120 Hertz refresh rate of the display I mean this is about as bare-bones as you can get without buying a pixel device. Now, with the original razor phone, the display was very colorful and had a decent contrast ratio, definitely not as deep a black as what an OLED display might be able to give you, but it was a very serviceable display, especially when using it indoors, but the moment you would step outside, you would realize that it really didn't get that bright, and it became difficult to see. For example, taking photos outside was pretty difficult to see if you had your exposure or you're framing or if things were in focus, because the display just didn't get bright enough well, with the razor phone too. Now it gets 50 percent brighter.

This is almost matching the brightness level of an OLED panel, so that is a huge thumbs up from me now, of course, because this is an LCD IPS type display. It's not going to be able to completely dim the pixels when you're looking at black scenes, so I think movies and videos are just gonna pop better on OLED display, especially when there are more dark environments, but overall playing games and watching movies and TV shows is fantastic on this device. It's a very colorful, very satisfying display, I'd, say in about 97% of the circumstances, and now it's time to talk about the camera. These are brand new Sony sensors in here and racer was touting that this is now going to be a flagship camera at their press event, and I was really looking forward to testing this out and trying it out and seeing if it could potentially compete with other top smartphone cameras. The front camera is still the same.

It's still solid front camera now, with my original razor phone I did a comparison between the iPhone 10 and the razor phone camera, and there was a number of photos why I actually picked the razor phone's picture over the iPhone 10. The main thing about the original razor phone was the software was pretty bare-bones and pretty minimal. Well, the good thing about the razor phone to the new camera interface is more intuitive, and it has two new modes. We have the beauty mode and panoramic mode. Now the panoramic mode seemed to work just fine, but the beauty mode was absolutely ridiculous, resulting in these crazy bug-eye photos.

I think they may have turned up their beauty mode a little too much. Now you can adjust how much of the beauty mode is going to be applied, but I don't see me ever using this now the portrait mode has been improved, but it doesn't have HDR functionality. So you don't have the same dynamic range that you would have with the iPhone 10s max, for example, as you can see on the right now. Another new mode is the front camera selfie portrait mode, and this does work fairly well. The edge detection actually did a better job than it did on the iPhone 10s max.

You can see in the top right here. My hair is blurred out on the iPhone 10 s max where it was not blurred out on the razor phone, but once again you also don't have HDR. So when you're taking selfies in certain environments, you're going to have the background really blown out now the razor phone twos main camera just for taking ordinary photos, it's actually really, really good I've been able to take some surprisingly fantastic photos. With this thing, better than I was honestly expecting now. I think Racer needs to tweak the software a bit originally I thought the photos of the razor phone too, were noticeably worse than they actually are when I loaded them onto a computer.

I realized. Oh, these actually aren't that overexposed. The main thing here is looking at the red tones of the face like this is blander. This carries the skin tone much better on the regular computer screen. Now the video mode on the razor phone too really struggles.

The audio is really not good at all. Originally, there was an audiobook that made it absolutely garbage, but Racer has released a fix to make the audio passable. Okay, we're looking at front camera video on the razor phone, but there's still a lot of audio garble, going out of the background that wasn't there with the original razor phone and that's where we also got to compare the razor phone to the original razor phone's camera. The major difference here is: we have new software and new Sony sensors, and this has dramatically changed how these images are being processed. You can see on the razor phone -.

It is a much cooler image. The whites appear a little, bluish I believe the color temperature of these images and video is off, whereas on the original razor phone it might be just a hair too warm, but the original razor phone did capture the real-life image and color much better in this particular sunset environment. Now this color balancing and color interpretation isn't going to be nearly as apparent in all images, but it did make a huge difference in the same of the test images that I did take, and the weird thing is when it comes to video I, do believe. I preferred the razor phone original video over the new razor phone to video mode for better audio and the way the colors are interpreted. Overall.

I will say that the camera has been improved when it comes to taking photos, but they have taken a step backward when it comes to taking video. Now razor has been pretty good about releasing updates to their software that improves the camera. For example, when the original razor phone was launched, that didn't have portrait mode, but several months ago they did add in the portrait mode, so I believe that razor will be tweaking the software of this camera to make it better, maybe improve the color temperature issue that I'm talking about here so overall I'll expect the images and video mode especially to improve as razor updates the software. Now, how does the razor phone to stack up when compared to other flagship devices when it comes to photos I think the razor phone too is really close, but when it comes to the video mode, it is still lagging far behind. So if you're looking to shoot a lot of video, you might actually want to consider saving a few dollars and going with the original razor phone or, alternatively, go with one of razor's competitors.

All of that said, people weren't buying the original razor phone for its camera. It was a mediocre at best camera last year, and people still bought the razor phone you're buying this phone for its amazing display. It's good speakers, the 120 Hertz refresh rate, the minimal bare-bones operating system and very optimized smooth experience. Now, when it comes to battery life, the razor phone 2 packs a 4000 William hour battery, which is a very, very large battery, so big thumbs up from me. But here's the thing you're going to get middle of the road level battery performance.

If you're running this at max resolution and 120 Hertz refresh rate now the majority of the time that I used my razor phone I actually ran it at 90, Hertz refresh rate, so that I would get an additional hour of battery life out of the box. Full resolution a hundred twenty Hertz display Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on you're going to end up running out of battery life after about three hours and 45 minutes of screen on time, maybe a little more, depending on what you're doing, if you're doing gaming, apps or just doing a light web browsing, but that's approximately how much screen on time I was giving in the course of me using this phone the last week and a half now the great thing about a razor phone is that you have all these additional features that are turned on initially, and you're. Still getting solid battery life 3 hours and 45 minutes of screen on time is enough for the vast majority of people to get through their day no problem. But the great thing is, you can turn off these additional high-end features like 120 Hertz display you can knock it down to 90, Hertz or down to 60 Hertz and drastically improve your battery life and, if you're, really in a pinch, you can reduce the resolution down from 1440p down to 1080p and get even more battery life. You can definitely push 7 to 8 hours of screen.

On time, if you reduce the resolution and refresh rate now, Racer has added ip67 water and dust resistance, which is particularly amazing, because we have these giant speaker grilles. So they have waterproof. These and they've actually also improved these speakers so that they are now a bit louder about 5 decibels, louder, which is a pretty dramatic improvement. Actually, whether they're dramatically better than something like the note, 9 or the iPhone tennis max I, would say, they're on par I. Think the main advantage to the razor phone speakers is that they're both facing you and when you hold the device in your hand, you're not blocking any of the sound you're not covering up the sound holes on the side, like you would, with the note, 9 or iPhone tennis max, which makes for a much better viewing experience when you don't have to cradle your phone in a weird way to prevent sound blockage.

Now at 799. The razor phone 2 is not cheap, but it does undercut much of its competition. The note 9 coming in at 8 dollars the iPhone 10s max coming in at 1100, but you do have cheaper options out there with very similar feature sets. For example, you have the galaxy s, 9 plus right around $800 right now. You also have the 1 plus 6, which is significantly cheaper at five hundred and thirty dollars.

So, if you're looking for peer value, something like the one plus six or the galaxy s, 9 plus or even something like the note, 8 or the galaxy s, 8 plus, is gonna, be a better bang for the buck than the razor phone. Too I've used the galaxy s.9 plus I've used the galaxy s.8 I've used the Galaxy Note 9. All of those devices have legs. Stutters jitteriness in animations they've all slowed down over time, maybe not on their total app loading, but with their animations and speed. I used the original RAZOR phone for 6 months last year and I dug it out of the shelf to do some camera comparisons, and that thing is still buttery smooth.

It is absolute dream to use. The simple fact is: the razor phone is a premium smartphone at a reasonable price and the number one reason to buy it is the 120 Hertz refresh rate the super optimized software. The lack of bloatware such as Bigamy I think it's a really great overall experience with the main thing holding it back being the camera. So if you're someone that really values the camera, you're, probably gonna, want to take a pass on this device can I recommend it absolutely I can, so that's it for my review of the razor phone ? we'll see you guys in the next one Brandon.

Source : GizmoSlipTech