Motorola Razr i XT890 in the flesh, first impressions

Lats week’s @geekynights show introduced us to the Motorola Razr i (XT890) which is one of the very few Intel-powered Android smartphones in the market. It’s been released in the US about two quarters ago but never officially arrived in the country.

One of our co-hosts, @marklim, shipped it straight from the US for about Php15,000USD 256INR 21,669EUR 243CNY 1,862 (including shipping and duties) only to drop it on the floor a few days later, leaving a nice bump on the aluminum chassis.

The Razr i is very interesting because it’s among the few handsets that run on an Intel Atom Z2460. We’re curious on how that chip performs compared to the other dual-core and quad-core chips we normally encounter with other handsets.

The design and build-quality is also pretty interesting — the white variant is made up of light aluminum and polycarbonate materials that is covered with Kevlar which gives it a premium feel.

The device look pretty small but is actually 4.3 inches across (the narrow bezel does allow for bigger screen real estate). The display is a combo of Super AMOLED Advanced and Gorilla Glass (the somewhat greenish tint of the screen was a giveaway that it was AMOLED).

The device has a bit of heft to it, is also very thin at just 8.3mm. The shape somewhat tapers towards the bottom end and reminds us of the Asus Padfone.

The unit only has Android 4.0 ICS out of the box but an official ROM (already on OTA in Europe) is available so @marklim flashed it to upgrade to Jellybean.

The 8MP camera at the back is very prominent but that HD Video label just made it look un-sightly. We weren’t able to take photos at that time but the existing ones showed to us looked pretty decent.

If you looked at the hardware configuration, the Razr i obviously belongs to the mid-range category with that sub-720p display resolution and single-core processor.

Motorola Razr i XT890 specs:
4.3-inch Super AMOLED Advanced display @ 540×960 pixels, 256ppi
Corning Gorilla Glass
Intel Atom Z2460 2.0GHz single-core processor
Hyperthreading
PowerVR SGX540
1GB RAM
8GB internal storage
up to 32GB via microSD
3G/HSPA+ 21.1Mbps
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, dual-band, DLNA
Bluetopoth 2.1, A2DP
NFC
8MP rear camera, LED flash
1080p video recording @ 30fps
VGA front-facing camera
GPS w/ aGPS support
Andoroid 4.1.2 Jellybean
Li-Ion battery 2,000mAh

However, the battery capacity looks good and according to @marklim, the battery life in idle mode is really good.

So we ran a couple of benchmarks to see how the Intel chip fare against the competition.

The results actually surprised us — a Quadrant score of 4,163 which trumped the Nexus 10 (3,806) and close to the quad-core Meizu MX (4,046); the Antutu Benchmark gave it an over-all rating of 14,063 (beating the Galaxy S3 at 12k and Note 2 at 13.5k ).

Nenamark 2 pegs it s 51.4fps which is still pretty good.

Considering that this is just a single-core chip the Atom Z2460 is a powerful processor. The Hyperthreading technology allows it to act like it has 2 cores so we’re very curious how the next generation dual-core Atom will perform.