The KRZR K3 is the second model in the KRZR line after the KRZR K1, and is followed by a couple of remakes of the K1, namely
the K1m and the K1 Gold. The K1m is an EV-DO and CDMA phone made primarily for the American market.
The KRZR K3 is a 3G phone with a 2megapixel main camera and is available in two shades of grey. They are Dark Pearl Gray and
Lustrous Stone Gray.
Data cable
Exterior
The KRZR K3 is a slimmer version of the RAZR form factor. It is essentially a smaller clamshell, and is rather more pleasant
to the eye than the wider RAZR. The front of the phone has a shiny, reflective finish while the back battery cover has a
duller tone.
The main speaker is at the bottom of the back cover. The button on the right side is the camera shortcut key, while the
volume toggle and a smart key are on the left side. The smart key is set to messaging by default.
The USB charger port is on the left side of the device and an eyelet for the lanyard is built into the hinge that joins both
halves of the phone.
Buttons/Screen
The keypad is probably the least pleasant looking part of the K3, since a putrid teal-turquoise colour is used for the
backlight. Of course, this is a matter of preference but I am of the opinion that electric blue is a lot more pleasant than,
well, puke green.
Having said that, the blue backlight of the keypad is quite similar to the blue used in the keypad of the original RAZR, but
it just doesnˇ¦t go well with the dark grey of our review unit. And the hotkeys on both sides of the phone still do not light
up when pressed.
The 2-inch screen is specified at 262K colours, and it is a TFT screen. The interface was quite fair for a device of this
size. The number keys were large enough to easily pick out, especially when typing in text messages.
Software/Messaging
The RIZR uses a 3x4 grid of icons as its menu. The menu is brought up easily enough but the SCREEN 3 application is a pain
that cannot be turned off easily. It is almost as though the device is forcing you to connect to GPRS and download something.
This one had Yahoo Go on the menu instead of Google as found in the RIZR Z3. It shows that in the last year, Internet
applications have increasingly become integral to handset manufacturers, as evidenced by the placement of the icon as the
first icon on the menu.
The iTAP is still terrible, in all the years of its existence. It is turned on by default and that is quite irritating as you
will have to scrabble around in the menus to turn it off.
PIM
The PIM in this device is quite minimal. The alarm clock and calculator are about all the PIM applications in the phone. Some
may use the datebook, but I have never been a fan of using a number pad to input diary entries.
Apparently, this is not a PDA-type phone. The keypad is OK for short term use, but not for extended typing. There is a voice
message application found in the Tools menu. This application is good for short recordings, but asks you to send the recorded
voice clip immediately after you record something.
Camera/Video
The KRZR K3 has a 2.0 megapixel camera as its main camera. There is also a secondary VGA camera located at the bottom right
of the screen. This one serves to project your image on your friendˇ¦s phone when you are making a 3G video call.
The K3 has a 8x digital zoom, and the on-screen controls for the camera are now transparent so that you can see behind the
graphic of the control on the screen. I like the colour feature that permits you to add many colour filters to your camera,
just like with some professional cameras. You can set your pictures to tint in red, blue, green or yellow. You can even set
it to plain black & white or simply invert the colours for a view like the negative of the film.
We found that if you held the phone on its side, with the camera hotkey facing upwards to shoot a picture in landscape mode,
the options key ended up in a really silly place that you could not get to with any of your fingers. Well, you could if you
had large hands like mine, but it felt really uncomfortable and silly to do so.
The other thing is, when you close the phone, you can still use the main camera by pressing down on the camera hotkey for a
while. However, the viewfinder shows the picture upside down when held in landscape mode, although it displayed quite alright
in portrait mode. And then, you canˇ¦t turn off the camera in the closed-clamshell state, and you must flip open the phone to
turn off the camera.
It was so disconcerting to find the camera behaving so oddly that we nearly forgot to tell you about the red light that
flashes on the outside of the phone when it is in camera mode. There is no way to turn this off and likewise, no way to take
surreptitious pictures because the subject will be able to see the flashing red light.
Multimedia/Voice
As we mentioned earlier, there is a way to record voice notes, but the phone keeps asking you to send those notes to someone.
The music playback is quite alright and rather loud.
You might want to use the rather good speaker for audio, but it is a mystery to me why anyone would want to watch videos on
small phone screens.
Connectivity
This phone has Bluetooth, but does not support infrared. You can also sync to the computer via USB and there is an
application called MotoSync that lets you keep files on both phone and computer current.
One thing we found here was that the phone needs to have a memory card in the slot before it will accept computer files
transferred through the data cable. This leads us to conclude that the computer sees the phone like a card reader without the
card. This was without installing anything from the CD, although the computer was able to detect the KRZR K3 as a removable
hard disk.
This K3 is a tri-band device and it also supports 3G UMTS and 3.5G HSDPA. The GPRS goes up to Class 12.
Games
There are two games in the phone. Block Breaker Deluxe requires you to bounce a ball around and knock off blocks on the
screen. The other game is Platinum Sudoku, which explains itself pretty much.
| Editor's Opinion |
The KRZR is a really sleek-looking phone that feels wonderful in the palm of the hand. However, it canˇ¦t do much more than
talk and text. Granted, you can surf the net. However, do you really want to do that all the time on such a small screen?
OK, you can load music into the phone and use it as an MP3 player, and this is where the device really excels, as the
Motorola still has one of the best speakers on a phone. The memory card goes under the battery cover, but you do not need to
remove the battery to swap the card in or out. There was no exact information, but we surmise that if you can swap the card
in or out without removing the battery, then the device would probably support hotswapping.
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