How long did your smartphone last?

[ny biker]

So, some initial thoughts about my new Motorola Droid Razr Maxx, for anyone else who might be in the market for a new smartphone...

Physically -- I think the phone is too big. At 5'7", I am not a small woman, and my hands are not small. But even with a textured case on this phone, when I hold it in one hand I feel like I don't have a secure grip on it because it's just a bit too wide. Also when writing text messages with the phone sideways, the keyboard is a bit bigger than I would like for thumb-typing. And if I want to carry it in the front pocket of my jeans, I'm lucky if half the phone is inside the pocket, so I'm always worried about it falling out.

If you do have small hands or want a smaller phone for other reasons, I don't know what your options are for smartphones. Iphones, I guess, and I noticed the new HTC Incredible 4 is smaller than the Droid Razr and Razr Maxx. The latest hot new thing from Samsung (Galaxy III? I can't keep track) is even bigger than the Razr.

<rant> It makes me really angry that so many of the phones on the market are so big. They are all clearly designed by and for men. </rant>

Another issue I have with the physical phone is the buttons. The power button wiggles and feels like it might break off the phone. (From reading the android forums, I'm not alone in feeling this way, though no one has complained about the button actually breaking off.) It's also too recessed -- I have to press it several times to wake the phone up or put it to sleep sometimes. Same with the volume rocker -- when I try to adjust the volume while talking on the phone, I can't always press the rocker from the right angle to get it to respond, so I have to move the phone away from my ear to adjust the volume.

I should note that I'm using a Motorola case for the phone. So the case might be contributing to some of the problems accessing the buttons, but with an officially sanctioned case from the same company that made the phone, that shouldn't happen.

There is one other issue I'm having with the phone -- my primary email address is with aol, and the built-in email app has known issues with aol mail. I first set up my account by choosing the aol icon from a list of common email providers, but I found the phone never updated my email. So after several days I deleted the account and set it up again by following the steps for a generic provider, and since then it sometimes updates automatically, sometimes updates if I hit the refresh button, and sometimes won't update at all.

Now, on the positive side, the battery does last longer than other phones (I generally get > 24 hours on a charge, despite a fair amount of game-playing which tends to eat the battery). The screen resolution is excellent and it does work faster than my old 3G phone. I think the added speed is both from 4G and from having a dual-core processor -- my brother has an older 3G Motorola phone and he told me that its dual core processor made it faster than his previous 3G phone.

In general I found it very easy to set up and personalize the phone with the shortcuts and widgets that I want on the various home screens. There are a couple of handy toggle shortcuts for turning on GPS, Bluetooth, airplane mode and stuff like that so you don't have to go through the settings menu to access them.

I did have problems when I transferred my contacts from my old phone via Verizon's backup assistant, but I don't know if that was the fault of Motorola or Verizon. In my old phone, you chose how to display each contact name when you entered or edited it, and for most I chose "last name, first name," but for some I used the default "first name last name" either because it wasn't relevant (for a business name) or because I just forgot to change it. When all of this transferred into the new contacts app, most of the names were messed up, with last names in the first name field and vice versa. So I had to go through and manually correct most of them.

Once those corrections were done, I created some contact groups, which was very easy to do. And on this phone there is one setting for name display that applies to all contacts, so it will be consistent for me now.

I haven't had much chance to use the camera, but it's easy enough to do. I like the slider switch that makes it fast to switch from still photos to video. It's also easy to switch between front lens and back.

As for the actual telephone functionality, I have no complaints -- call quality has been fine so far.

I copied some music to the phone from my pc, which was easy enough. HUGE BONUS: while listening to songs on the phone's music player, it displays the lyrics. Since I like to learn songs and sing them to myself while I ride my bike, this is very helpful for those lines that I could just never figure out on my own.

There are some other features of this phone (and maybe others from Motorola) that I either haven't had a chance to play with or see no point in using. For example, Smart Actions can be set up to automatically make changes to phone settings for things you do often, like turning off background data and phone volume while you sleep. And Motoprint allows you to print documents directly from your phone. And something called Motocast will sync with your pc so you can access video and music from one to the other, but I don't really see that as being useful for me.

So in general I'd say it's a good phone. I think the HTC Incredible was better from a physical standpoint, but the Razr Maxx is generally better in terms of software.

p.s. There's a lot of good information on the android user forums about maximizing the phone's battery life, as well as dealing with various issues that might crop up. In particular, the phone comes with the Gingerbread version of the operating system, and I've read that many users have had to do a factory reset after installing Ice Cream Sandwich to fix problems with shortened battery life.

p.p.s. I still don't have a bento box that is large enough for this phone. I can squeeze it into my LG Gel Box 2, but it leaves no room for anything else. I've ordered an LG Gel Box Plus, which is larger than the Gel Box 2, but it's on backorder.