Razer Phone: My favourite brick

Dominik Bärlocher

2.2.2018

Translation: machine translated

It's big, chunky, minimalist and great. The Razer Phone impresses from A to Z. With the exception of K for camera app. Because it's rubbish. But I have found a fix.

The Razer Phone is gigantic. It is angular, massive and very, very masculine in design. This comes as no surprise, as Razer - a company that has made a name for itself with the production of gaming hardware - has mainly had gamers as its audience for years. If we take a quick look at the statistics, it becomes clear that women are still in the minority in online gaming, even if they have caught up considerably in recent years.

• World of Warcraft: 77% of players are male
• Dragon Age Inquisition: 52% male
• Heroes of the Storm: 85% male
• DOTA 2: 94% male
• League of Legends: 86% male
• StarCraft II: 95% male

The market research institute Quantic Foundry, which specialises in video games, published these figures in 2016 and came to the conclusion that only 18.5% of active gamers across all genres and platforms are women
.

This is also reflected in the design of gaming hardware. Hard edges, corners, squares and triangles are design elements that are typically used in masculine products. Or the other way round: if you want a man to like something, it has corners, edges and squares. If you want a woman to like it, it will be rounded and designed with circles. In her search for a beautiful PC case, my colleague Léonie de Montmollin came to the following conclusion.

So the Razer Phone knows its audience. I have a problem with that to a certain extent. I'm against meaningless unisex designs that are somehow made for everyone or no one, but Razer isn't doing itself any particular favours here.

Smartphones

Razer Phone

64 GB, Black, 5.70", Single SIM, 12 Mpx, 4G

16

The Razer Phone is a device that pretty much everyone will enjoy.

Razer goes big

The advertising for the Razer Phone could not be more target group-specific. A mistake. Gaming, gaming, gamers can game, gaming gaming, blah blah blah. As an avowed "I play something every now and then" gamer, I was initially quite repulsed by this. I do build Super Nintendos myself, but then it's kind of done for me. The journey is the reward and all that.

But here I'm in two minds. Because although I've now demonised the design and the advertising strategy, the shamelessness of the Razer Phone is one of my favourite aspects of the thing. It's a brick. It's heavy, big and makes a lot of noise. And it does it very, very well. So why fall back on a unisex design here, or somehow dilute the core message? I have no answers, but plenty of thoughts.

So, enough about taste and gender. Why isn't Razer doing itself any favours with the marketing to make this phone appealing to gamers? The Razer Phone is a device that will most likely appear again at the end of the year, in the list of Phones of the Year. This is because the next generation of flagship smartphones will probably be largely inferior to the Razer Phone.

The specs sound absurd in the context of what we are used to from the smartphone market. Where other phones are content with 4 gigabytes of RAM and scene observers celebrate phones with 6GB, Razer goes one better with 8GB. Coupled with the energy-saving Snapdragon 835 system on a chip and a 4000 mAh battery, this makes the phone a beast that is second to none.

Add to this the 120 Hertz screen, which refreshes the image on your screen 120 times per second, making all animations appear as smooth as butter. Not a trace of the brute force under the bonnet.

In general, I never managed to even begin to stress the phone during testing. No matter what I tried - games, video, apps, all at the same time if possible - the Razer Phone never slowed down in the slightest. At the beginning of the test, my colleague Philipp Rüegg asked me whether the screen with its 120 Hertz, which has to be activated manually first, doesn't eat up too much battery. No, Philipp, it doesn't. At the end of the working day, I have between 40 and 70 per cent battery left and I recently discharged the phone completely. That took about 48 hours, at least 12 of which I spent watching YouTube on endless playlists. Then torch.

The Razer Phone is indestructible.

The pain with the camera app

The Razer Phone has one major weakness: the camera app. Just like the Essential PH-1, the app is too poor for the built-in hardware.

• It takes several seconds for an HDR image to be captured. Don't let your subject move during this time
• HDR is switched on by default, even if this makes the camera infinitely slower
• No artificial bokeh effect
• No manual settings, which other cameras don't have either, but I almost expect that from a powerhouse like the Razer Phone

Even worse. Since the latest update, the app has been crashing regularly. I have not been able to find out exactly what causes the crashes, because availability of a service on a phone is one of the most important things for me. If the supplied camera app doesn't perform, or another app, then I'm going to be annoyed shortly.

Razer, you make a great phone that simply crushes last year's flagships and then you mess up your camera? No way!

The solution for the camera app

Because Android is more of a platform than an operating system, everyone is free to programme their own apps or - if the coder allows it - to modify other apps. Google is generally accommodating. Resourceful programmers from the Android Community xda-developers have therefore made the camera app of Google Pixel devices accessible to other Android devices.

Installed on the Razer Phone, the app, which you have to install manually, offers the following:

• RAW support
• Faster images in HDR+
• Correction of frequently occurring image errors and distortions

But there is a catch. The app port is not made specifically for the Razer Phone. It is therefore possible that the app runs somewhat unstable or that the front camera can no longer be accessed at all. I will try to find the optimum settings for the Razer Phone below. Because the port is worth the work and the phone itself is a lot of fun again.

App sideload: This is how it works

In order to install an app manually - i.e. outside of the Google Play Store - you must first allow your device to do so.

1. Go to the settings
2. Go to Security
3. Activate Unknown Sources

Now nothing stands in the way of your adventure with sideloading. But please note: The app that we are installing on the Razer Phone is not made exclusively for the device's hardware. The app may therefore be unstable.

Furthermore, I must point out that we at digitec cannot accept any liability for any damage to your device. Nor can we offer any support for such solutions. I'll try to pass on all my knowledge to you, but afterwards you're on your own.

But: You can't do any major damage by sideloading the app. If nothing really works anymore: Uninstall the app again, restart your phone and you're good to go.

1. Download the Camera Port
2. Install the app
3. Open the app
4. Done

Now you can actually take photos and you will quickly notice that the camera is faster and the pictures are far less blurry. The question arises: Why the hell can't Razer get this right out of the box?

You can also configure the app. According to xda developers user soonpark, the following settings work best:

• Model: Pixel XL (corr)
• Support Level Override: ZSL
• Supported HW Level Back Camera: Full
• Supported HW Level Front Camera: Level_3
• Panorama Resolution: High
• Save Location: On
• Camera Shutter Sounds: Off
• Volume Key Action: Volume
• Config Camera: Pixel 2017 Hardware Zsl Hdr+
• Buffers Size: 3 (default)
• Total Imagereader Imagecount: 15 (others)
• hdr+ burst frame count: 8 (Nexus 6)
• Calculation hdr+ imagereader image count: Others
• Back Camera photo resolution: (4:3) 12.2 Megapixel
• Front Camera photo resolution: (4:3) 8.0 Megapixel

So. ready

I have taken the Razer Phone firmly into my heart. It's unashamedly chunky, minimalist and a bastion of technology. It performs well, consumes little juice and is a dream to handle. If you want a phone and are into over-the-top specs with the motto "because we can", then this is your phone. You don't even have to be a gamer to want or like the phone. It's enough if you just want a damn good phone.

Razer Phone, see you in the best-of list at the end of the year.

Dominik Bärlocher

Senior Editor

dominik.baerlocher@digitecgalaxus.ch

Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.

Follow

---

Smartphone

Follow topics and stay updated on your areas of interest

Follow topic