Razors debut smartphone has a machined aluminum unibody, it looks sharp with hard lines and squared off corners a bit different from the curved earphones we've been seeing lately, it's not following the bezel as trend either the screen is framed by rather large bezels that has a stereo speaker setup, the speaker grilles make the phone look a bit waffle like and or a bit of a dust magnet, but they are THX certified with Dolby Atmos technology. They're seriously loud and put out some really crisp and clear audio, there is no 3.5 millimeter jack though so you'll have to live the double life if you get this phone, don't worry there's a USB type-c adapter included in the box, sound output through headphones is loud but not as impressive as other flagships.
You would think that leaving out the jack would mean that Razer was trying to make the phone more waterproof, but sorry there's no water resistance on this one.
The fingerprint reader is mounted on the side and it's a physical button, so you'll have to press it down to activate its reliable, but not the fastest.
There is 64 gigs of storage on board the Razer phone, there is no 128 gigabyte option available, it is expandable though through a microSD slot.
On the back there is dual camera setup and an engraved Razer logo kind of neat looking, back to the front and razor's 5.7 inch exo IPS LCD screen, it might be the most unique feature about this phone and as a native Q HD resolution in a 16 by 9 aspect ratio.
So what's all the fuss about? This is the world's first 120 Hertz ultra motion smart phone display, it's about twice the refresh rate of what you get on other phones and since this variable will keep up perfectly with the frame rate put out by the GPU. The result is that motion on the display looks super smooth it makes you feel as if there is more processing power preventing any lag scrolling on a webpage feels delightful and stays sharp with no blurring or tearing at all, its effect on gaming performance is complicated though but more on that in a second. 120 Hertz sounds great but there's a downside it takes a lot of power, the exo technology in the display was probably chosen to save energy but the result is a screen that's not very bright at all, brightness maxes out at 300 nits which puts it at the bottom of our list, contrast is an on par with other flagships and neither is sunlight legibility, so don't count on a great gaming experience outdoors, color accuracy is good though.
Under the hood is a Snapdragon 835 chipset standard for most of this year's Android flagships, it does have eight gigs of RAM but not sure if it can all be utilized by Android. In benchmarks it performs near the upper end of this year's Snapdragon 835 devices and graphics wise it's on par with a flash of competition with is in doing a 540, it did get hot during testing but never started to throttle this heat could become uncomfortable during long gaming sessions. With certain titles you can just go hands-off with a third-party Bluetooth controller it really is a shame that razer isn't offering any such accessories of its own at least not yet that is, but now on to the gaming experience itself game booster offers convenient controls over CPU speeds resolution and FPS caps on a per app basis, just make sure that the game's resolution matches the system-wide one or there will be problems, but even if you start tweaking on a per title level most game engines can't really come close to 120 fps mark by design.
Arena valor is a MOBA title that raised a showcase at the launch event and native resolution the game only managed to get as high as 50 FPS on occasion it's far from 120 required to saturate the Refresh potential of the panel, lowering resolution didn't increase the frame rate either. Gear.club is a racing game that comes pre-installed on the razor we did manage to get higher FPS readings in the 75 range but again literally no change when we messed with resolution, but games capable of pumping out 120 FPS do exist. Altos adventure looks great and really smooth at this high frame rate. Another title we managed to find was bad land 2 out of all the games we tested it behaved the most like a PC title lowering the resolution actually helped to keep 120 FPS easily and more comfortably.
120 FPS gaming is great if you can find a title that can do it, but you'll have to take our word for it you can't see it in a recording unless what the footage and monitor are also at the same framerate.
The razer phone has a giant 4000 milliamp hour battery but unfortunately battery life isn't outstanding even with the low max brightness the high refresh rate panel is really power-hungry so the razer in 62 hours in a proprietary tests, charging the razor phone however is impressively fast thanks to quick charge 4 Plus technology, we managed to get this big battery from 0% all the way up to 70% in just half an hour, there is no wireless charging.
The razer phone runs a surprisingly clean Nova Launcher / Android 7.1.1 nougat, it's pretty blow free with a minimal app package. The UI does allow for a tremendous amount of customisation options, you can tweak almost everything gestures, the app drawer, animations and even how notifications look. There are also a bunch of cool themes available from Razer through the themes app free of charge.
Finally onto the camera, unfortunately it seems like this part of the phone wasn't a high priority for Razer is a 12 megapixel dual camera setup with one F 1.75 wide-angle and in depth 2.6 telephoto, but this doesn't tell you much.
The camera interface is pretty bare-bones you get no modes or panoramas and no filters there is HDR mode but it's not automatic you have to toggle it every single time and we suggest that you do. The camera's native dynamic range is far from stellar and the Razer phone really struggles with exposure sunlight can cause a lot of problems in the shot. Using the telephoto zoom can be frustrating as well the phone uses a feature called seamless zoom work is switching between a telephoto and a crop of the main camera as you zoom in and out, there's no indication of which is which needless to say kind of confusing.
In low-light even when you're not zooming everything is pretty underwhelming especially for a flagship phone.
The 8 megapixel selfie cam is okay but not impressive, the focus is fixed so shots may come out blurry from time to time and good lighting is definitely recommended. 4k videos come out really sharp but not as detail rich as other flagships, there are still exposure problems sometimes and no stabilization to speak of 1080p videos aren't a major step down from 4k, but the exposure still has problems. There is no 60 FPS mode here either.
Razer wanted to deliver a phone there revolves around the gaming experience and in some ways it has, performance always a holds up well against other flagships the stereo speaker setup is really impressive and 120 Hertz display is incredibly smooth, but unfortunately there aren't that many games out yet they can take advantage of the high refresh rate and the unique screen is kind of dim and power hungry, so battery life suffers. The camera on this phone feels sort of like an afterthought too, while the shortcomings of the Razer phone seem to outweigh the benefits, we are excited that Razer is pushing the boundaries was possible on a mobile device, we could be looking at the next big smartphone trend.
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