Motorola’s RAZRi Has a Whopping 2GHz Intel Processor

Calling it their "biggest launch since the original RAZR" (no sniggering in the back row, please), Motorola's RAZRi is the first phone with a 2GHz Intel processor; however good that may be. Sounds impressive though, non?

Intel's saying it's the first phone not only with a 1GHz Intel processor, but any 2GHz processor - for the record, the San Diego phone Intel made had just a 1.6GHz Atom X2460 chipset.

Further specs reveal that the RAZRi will run Android 4.0.4 - no Jelly Bean here yet - with 1GB RAM, while boasting an impressive 4.3″ display, all contained within a neat 126g package.

With a Gorilla Glass display that goes "edge-to-edge," it's also been coated with a waterproof coating like we first saw on Motorola's Xoom tablet last year. Meanwhile, a 2,000mAh battery is the one big drawcard for me, and will likely be for you, too. More so than the NFC that's been added? Uh…yeah. Obviously.

The 8MP camera can shoot 10 photos in less than a second, with the start-up time touted at under one second - so it should be pretty quick on the draw. On the software side, too, Motorola's added a "circles widget", which lets you touch a circle on the homescreen and grab vitals such as battery life.

Initially launching in Europe and Latin America, it's not clear when the RAZRi will make it to US shores.

Apple EarPods Review: Better! (But Still Garbage)

Pretty soon millions—tens of millions!—of suckers will own a pair of Apple EarPods. If you hated the old Apple buds because they sound terrible and don't fit, good news is that these are better. And they still come free with a device. The bad news is that they're still a pretty poor way to experience music.

What Is It?
The earbuds that come with the iPhone 5 and iPods. They also sell separately for $30.

Who's It For?

Everybody. Nobody. Your junk drawer, eventually.

Design

Little white plastic dots with an ergonomic new bulb shape. The speaker pokes out of the side of the buds, which is supposed to improve sound quality.

Using It

The EarPods fit into the cartilage of your ear and nuzzle their way just into where you ear canal begins. They (still) constantly fall out.

The Best Part

Better sound than the old buds.

Tragic Flaw

Universal plastic buds will never ever fit properly.

This Is Weird...

We want to thank Apple for trying to improve the earbuds of choice for people who don't know better.

Test Notes

Tested on my iPhone using, you know, the music on my iPhone.

1>The old buds were a tinny, muddy mess. On the EarPods, the high end still sounds crispy, but at least 

there's some bass in the mix now.

2>The new Pods also sound incrementally clearer than the buds. You'll hear more details.
They still hurt your ears, physically.

3>More than sound quality, what people really hated about the old buds was an improper fit. This made them basically unusable unless sitting perfectly still. Could we get a little rubber to help them stay in place? So much for music on the go.

EarPods. Weird name, right? Ear. Pods.

 EarPods.

To be fair, this is a freebie accessory. Other device makers don't bother to bundle products with quality accessories. so why should we expect Apple to? If you buy an iPhone 5 or iPod, you won't have a choice. You will involuntarily own them. That's fine—they're a fine backup pair, on par with that pair of Skullcandy buds someone left at your house one night.
But! We advise against purchasing individually packaged Apple EarPods from your neighborhood Apple Store. They're a little better than before, but they're still among the worst hardware Apple has ever made.

Apple EarPods

• Price: $30

iPhone 5 Review: A Better iPhone In Every Way

The first reviews of the iPhone 5 are out and everyone's in unison: the larger screen, the impossibly thin (and light!) body and the increased speed all make for the best iPhone ever. But is it for you?

CNET

First off, you're going to be shocked at how light this phone is. It's the lightest iPhone, even though it's longer and has a bigger screen. After a few days with it, the iPhone 4S will feel as dense as lead.
Secondly, the screen size lengthening is subtle: but, like the Retina Display, you're going to have a hard time going back once you've used it. The extra space adds a lot to document viewing areas above the keyboard, landscape-oriented video playback (larger size and less letterboxing), and home-page organizing (an extra row of icons/folders). Who knows what game developers will dream up, but odds are that extra space on the sides in landscape mode will be handily used by virtual buttons and controls.

USA Today

The move to 4 inches feels right for the iPhone, though it looks like a dwarf side-by-side with the 4.8-inch display on the Samsung Galaxy S III, arguably the best of the Android breed. I was able to display more than four extra paragraphs reading the same newspaper article on the Samsung as opposed to the iPhone 5. On the other hand, the iPhone screen appears sharper and brighter, and the phone is easier to carry.

Daring Fireball

Consider the windshield wipers on a car, and how, because they swing circularly, they can't reach the passenger-side top corner. Using the iPhone 5 is like that. There are two specific touch targets where this gives me trouble, both of which I invoke frequently. First, back buttons in the top left corner. I keep mis-tapping underneath them with my fully-outstretched thumb and then need to subtly re-grip the phone so that my thumb can reach. Second, tapping the status bar to scroll to the top of the current view. The top-left back-button issue is only a problem when holding the iPhone 5 one-handed in my right hand, but, I'm right-handed and so that's the hand I tend to use it with.

Pocket-Lint

Ditching the glass back and reducing the thickness of the glass panel on the front has affected the design of the metal band around the edge of the iPhone. It is now chamfered and while that looks pretty, we've already noticed that on the black model the edge has started to wear, revealing the shiny silver aluminium metal underneath the "slate" coloured coating and, indeed, we've witnessed it on two separate models, ruling out a fluke manufacturing error.

These small scuffs will catch the light and make the phone look visibly worn. We suspect that it won't be as noticeable on the white model because the metal edging is silver, so that's worth bearing in mind when you come to order your colour choice.

SlashGear

In fact, the iPhone 5 truly rivals a dedicated point & shoot in its camera abilities. Stills are crisp and bright, using a new spacial noise reduction system that can identify any outlier pixels – such as a rogue green dot in among an otherwise blue sky – and iron them out. There's also a low-light mode that promises a roughly two f-stop improvement in brightness and sensitivity by scaling down the end resolution and combining the data from four adjacent pixel clusters into each final dot in the frame.

NY Times

The camera is among the best ever put into a phone. Its lowlight shots blow away the same efforts from an iPhone 4S. Its shot-to-shot times have been improved by 40 percent. And you can take stills even while recording video (1080p hi-def, of course)...

There's a new panorama mode for the camera, too, that comes in handy more often than you might expect. As you swing the phone around you, it stitches many shots together into a seamless, ultra-wide-angle, 28-megapixel photo. Unlike other apps and phones with panorama modes, this one is fully automated and offers a preview of the panorama that materializes as you're taking it.

Telegraph

Starting the phone, loading apps, or taking photos - everything is faster on the iPhone 5. Benchmarking with the Geekbench app has shown that the iPhone 5 is not just faster than the iPhone 4S but it also outperforms Samsung's Galaxy S3.

CBC News

Apple says its new A6 dual-core processor has twice the power of the previous A5. In benchmark tests using the PassMark app, that certainly appears to be true. The iPhone 5 does everything - from computations to 3D rendering to opening apps - faster than the 4S, in some cases at double the speed.

Engadget

To test [the Lightning connector] we lined up an iPhone 4S next to an iPhone 5 and ran both through a number of syncs with large files. Pulling 5.5GB of data from iTunes to the iPhone 4S took five minutes and six seconds on average. Syncing those same files to the iPhone 5 took three minutes and 57 seconds on average. So, nearly 20 percent faster, but we're not sure how much of this is due to the new connector and how much can be attributed to faster internals in the phone itself.

WSJ

Using an iPhone 5 on the Verizon LTE network in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., I averaged almost 26 megabits per second for downloads and almost 13 megabits per second for uploads. Download speeds peaked at 42 megabits per second. These speeds are more than 10 times the typical speeds I got on an iPhone 4S running Verizon's slower 3G network and are faster than most Americans' home Internet services. While LTE affects only data, voice calls I made on the iPhone 5 were clear, better than in the past. I had no dropped calls.

The iPhone 5's battery lasted between 9 and 12 hours every day, in mixed use. For most people, the phone would last the day without recharging.

The Loop

If there is one problem I had with the iPhone, it would be with the apps that weren't designed for the larger screen. We're used to going to the bottom of the screen for the menu, but because the older apps are centered on the screen, the menus aren't there. I tap a few times before I realize I have to move my thumb up a little bit.

It's a minor quirk that will go away as soon as the developers up their apps.

TechCrunch

Testing the maps these last few days, I've come away impressed. No, I don't think they're as good as Google Maps, but they're not bad by any stretch of the imagination. I've looked up local venues and found them all. I've looked up places overseas and found them too. I've played with the 3D stuff, which is pretty, but probably not all that useful day-to-day. And, of course, I've used directions.

I used turn-by-turn fairly extensively on the highway one day and it worked well. It's great to have it on the lock screen and even better that it works even as you're in other apps (it will pop up alerts as you travel). This is a welcome addition.

A non-welcome subtraction is transit direction - as in, they no longer exist natively in the app. Instead, Apple is saying they will partner with other app makers on this, but none are live just yet so I couldn't test it out. If you live in a city where public transportation is key, this sucks.

Bloomberg

Moreover, the rear of the phone grew noticeably hot when the GPS system was in use for an extended period, though I didn't notice any undue impact on the phone's battery life or performance.

Apple says some heat buildup is to be expected given the demands of the GPS system, and that my experience with the app's inaccuracy was unusual; it provided me with a second unit that seemed to do better. Still, users should be wary until they're convinced the new app is as good as the one being booted out to make way for it.

TIME

But the slickest think about the new Maps is one of the most spectacular things that Apple, or anybody else, has ever put on a gadget: Flyover... Flyover melds 3D models with photos shot from airplanes to recreate urban worlds with unprecedented realism.

Not surprisingly, Flyover seems to be very, very data-intensive: It took a while for those gorgeous scenes to pop up into place when I viewed them. But it was worth it.