Razer Phone hands on By The Verge

Hey this is Dan with The Verge, and we are looking at the new razor phone, which is the first smartphone from Racer, which you may know more of as a gaming, laptop and peripheral company that makes mice and laptops and headsets and all this kind of stuff for gaming. But this is a smartphone, and it's the result of razors acquisition of next bit earlier this year. If you remember back in 2016 next bit released the phone called the Robin, which looks pretty similar to this phone there's a little differences, and we'll go into them. But basically you can see the DNA of next bits phone here in the razor phone. It's a very sharp angular design. You can see it's really hard edges and hard corners and calling it extremely rectangular as compared to some other phones.

I might have softer edges, but it's a very distinct design. It's got a 5.7 inch display it's 2k resolution and really the display is one of the main features here. It's a sharp TO panel. So it's an LCD panel. It's the same kind of displays that Racer uses on its gaming laptops and what they've done here is they've put in 120 Hertz, refresh cycles on it, which, if you're familiar with the iPad Pro that came out earlier this year, that had a 120 Hertz display.

This is the first phone to have it, which means that scrolling on it is superfast and super smooth. Everything is really slick and smooth. It's the kind of thing that it's a little hard to see in the video, so you kind of have to take my word for it, but when you're using the phone, it's really quite remarkable experience in terms of just how responsive the screen is. A razor has developed this technology to actually adjust itself. So if you are playing a game or watching a video, that's not running at 120 Hertz, the display will scale down to the appropriate frames per second for a video if you're watching a movie at 24 frames per second.

So things don't look weird, but most of the time you're going to be seeing this at 120 frames per second, which is superfast. It's definitely not something we're used to seeing on Android phones. The iPhone doesn't even run at this kind of frame rate, so it's pretty cool now. What's powering, that is a Snapdragon 835 processor, there's a bunch of tech specs inside this, including eight gigabytes of RAM, a giant 4,000 William hour battery and two front-facing speakers. So it's got stereo speakers each with their own amp and the thing that's really loud.

So when you playing music, we're playing a game, it's really designed to be held in landscape mode when you're playing a game and that the sound just kind of like barks at you across there you've got a power button with a fingerprint scanner on the side. Some volume rockers here on the side as well, and if you see on the bottom here, there's a USB-C charging port. This is also gonna, be your headphone jack. Despite the size of this phone, there is no headphone jack on it. So Racer is including an adapter to use 3.5 millimeter headphones. That adapter is T check, certified, which is cool.

It would be cooler to have a 3.5 millimeter, headphone jack and alongside of it for now at least, though, on the back side, you can see the kind of the design you got. Razors signature snake head logo here, which is the three snakes here, there's going to be a limited edition version of this. That's comes in that familiar Racer, green, but most of the models are the silver chrome color. Then above that is a dual camera system. It's two 12 megapixel cameras.

One of them is a standard lens. The other is a telephoto lens. One of the things that Racer has done with these cameras is enabled the smooth zoom function so that it will switch between the two lenses smoothly without having to push a button to switch between wide or telephoto. You just pinch your fingers and zoom in and zoom out as you want, and it will switch to whichever lens is appropriate for it. Aside from that cameras, app, that's really the only software that Racer has developed for the phone.

It's actually using Nova Launcher here, there's a little a partnership to enable Nova prime on the razor phone. So it's a Nova Launcher is very fast and customizable, and it's Android 7.1.1 under the hood here and Racer, says: there's going to be an update to Android audio coming in the first quarter of next year, but otherwise it's basically a stock Android experience, there's no customized UI or anything like that. All razors work has been done under the hood to optimize performance, enable the 120 Hertz display and things like that, as opposed to UI changes. Now that big display is five point. Seven inches across as I mentioned, it's a sixteen by nine display, and it means that the razor phone is a big phone, there's no really getting around it.

It also has a huge battery inside its 4,000 William hours, and it's pretty big in your hand, and the square design is really designed for two-handed use is not a small phone at all and if you compare it to other phones of this caliber, you'll see that it is quite a bit bigger. The build quality is very good, though it's a metal finish. It's the same metal that raisers using on its laptops, and it's really nice and well-built it's a bit step up from the Robins plastic finish that we saw a couple of years ago. Racer is going to be launching the razor phone in the middle of November in the US and Europe, so it cost about six hundred and ninety-nine dollars. You can buy an unlock direct from Racer, and it will work on ATT and T-Mobile for more on the razor phone and everything else be sure to check out the verge comm and YouTube.

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Source : The Verge