Gadgetory

hey this is Dan with The Verge and we are looking at the new razor phone which is the first smartphone from Razer which you may know more of as a gaming laptop and peripheral company that makes mice and laptops and headsets and all this kind of stuff for gaming but this is a smart phone and it's the result of razors acquisition of next bit earlier this year if you remember back in 2016 next bit released the phone called the Robin which looks pretty similar to this phone there's a little bit differences and we'll go into them but basically you can see the DNA of next bits phone here in the razor phone it's a very sharp angular design you can see it's really hard edges and hard corners and calling it extremely rectangular as compared to some other phones I might have softer edges but it's a very distinct design it's got a 5.7 inch display it's 2k resolution and really the display is one of the main features here it's a sharp XO panel so it's an LCD panel it's the same kind of displays that Razer uses on its gaming laptops and what they've done here is they've put in 120 Hertz refresh cycles on it which if you're familiar with the iPad pro that came out earlier this year that had a 120 Hertz display this is the first phone to have it which means that scrolling on it is super fast and super smooth everything is really slick and smooth it's the kind of thing that it's a little bit hard to see in the video so you kind of have to take my word for it but when you're using the phone it's really quite remarkable experience in terms of just how responsive the screen is a razor has developed this technology to actually adjust itself so if you are playing a game or watching a video that's not running at 120 Hertz the display will scale down to the appropriate frames per second for a video if you're watching a movie at 24 frames per second so things don't look weird but most of the time you're gonna be seeing this at 120 frames per second which is super fast it's definitely not something we're used to seeing on Android phones the iPhone doesn't even run at this kind of frame rate so it's pretty cool now what's powering that is a Snapdragon 835 processor there's a bunch of tech specs inside of this including eight gigabytes of RAM a giant 4,000 milliamp hour battery and two front-facing speakers so it's got stereo speakers each with their own amp and the thing that's really loud so when you playing music we're playing a game it's really designed to be held in landscape mode when you're playing a game and that the sound just kind of like barks at you across there you've got a power button with a fingerprint scanner on the side some volume rockers here on the side as well and if you see on the bottom here there's a USB C charging port this is also gonna be your headphone jack despite the size of this phone there is no headphone jack on it so Razer is including an adapter to use 3.5 milimeter headphones that adapter is T check certified which is cool it would be cooler to have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and alongside of it for now at least though on the back side you can see the kind of the design you got razors signature snake head logo here which is the three snakes here there's going to be a limited edition version of this that's comes in that familiar Razer green but most of the models are the silver chrome color then above that is a dual camera system it's two 12 megapixel cameras one of them is a standard lens the other is a telephoto lens one of the things that Razer has done with these cameras is enable the smooth zoom function so that it will switch between the two lenses smoothly without having to push a button to switch between wide or telephoto you just pinch your fingers and zoom in and zoom out as you want and it will switch to whichever lens is appropriate for it aside from that cameras app that's really the only software that Razer has developed for the phone it's actually using Nova Launcher here there's a little a partnership to enable Nova prime on the razor phone so it's a Nova Launcher is very fast and customizable and it's Android 7.1.1 under the hood here and Razer says there's going to be an update to Android audio coming in the first quarter of next year but otherwise it's basically a stock Android experience there's no customized UI or anything like that all of razors work has been done under the hood to optimize performance enable the 120 Hertz display and things like that as opposed to UI changes now that big display is five point seven inches across as I mentioned it's a sixteen by nine display and it means that the razor phone is a big phone there's no really getting around it it also has a huge battery inside of its 4,000 milliamp hours and it's pretty big in your hand and the square design is really designed for two-handed use is not a small phone at all and if you compare it to other phones of this calibre you'll see that it is quite a bit bigger the build quality is very good though it's a metal finish it's the same metal that raisers using on its laptops and it's really nice and well built it's a bit step up from the Robins plastic finish that we saw a couple years ago Razer is going to be launching the razor phone in the middle of November in the US and Europe so it cost about six hundred and ninety nine dollars you can buy an unlock direct from Razer and it will work on ATT and t-mobile for more on the razor phone and everything else be sure to check out the verge comm and youtube.com slash the verge school