The manga lookalike characters wield it like a switchblade, cutting through the roadside hoarding, peering down on the lesser mortals below. Yet, armed with the Razr2, mortals transcend the paradigm of ‘normal’ telephony and enter a whole new arena of sharper features, crisper voice and lightning quick response, all packed into a wafer-thin phone fully loaded at just over 1 cm thick, 2 mm less than its predecessor.

You may not be able to cut with it, but the design is tempting enough. The seamless casing is made of highly resistant stainless steel, which makes a skeletal system that can take extreme abuse. Drop it, bang it against table edges and there’s no mark on the cool steel. The most precious part of the exterior, the lens of the camera, has also been hardened, so no matter how hard you smash it—and we tried—the lens remains unscratched.

The magic of Razr2 seeps from the inside out to the 2-inch screen. The outer colour screen comes alive and becomes an active touch controller, so you don’t have to flip open the phone when you want to change the track playing in the music player and increase or lower the volume; you can even read messages and answer through preset replies with a single flick.

Flip it open and you find a large 2.2-inch screen which can be accessed through the standard Motorola keypad. Thankfully, the Razr2 is wider than its predecessor, so you don’t have to be stingy about touching it. Motorola has upgraded the internal processor and it shows. The menu access is fast and moving from one application to the other is a breeze. Running several applications simultaneously, like listening to music, keeping the Bluetooth headset active and writing an SMS, doesn’t affect the speed at which the phone responds to every touch. Writing the SMS, a frustrating experience on most Motorola phones, is much faster on the Razr2. Even the music transfer has been hastened through the use of the USB 2.0.

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