Motorola Motorazr Maxx V6 review

One neat trick is that this camera can be started up when the phone is shut by pressing a button on the right-hand side. This calls the external screen into play as a viewfinder, making it easy to frame group shots.

Motorola has had a go at cleaning up its menu system, but you'll notice when using it that there are still times when all logic appears to have been abandoned. For example, after snapping a picture using the camera, you're given the option to send it, however you can only use this option to send via MMS or email. If you want to send a picture via Bluetooth you have to first save it to memory, exit the camera application and then open it up in the media folder. Only from here can you choose to send it via Bluetooth. It's very frustrating.

The Maxx V6 supports the A2DP (stereo Bluetooth) profile, so you can link it to a pair of wireless Bluetooth headphones for listening to music. The music player can pump out tunes in MP3, WMA and AAC formats and it's very easy to create your own playlists of the tracks stored on the phone. We connected it to Orange's Stereo Bluetooth Speakers and found that the sound quality was very good, especially the deep bass on tracks like Damian Marley's Welcome to Jamrock.

Performance
Where the Maxx really stands out is when it's connected to the Web via the super-fast 3G HSDPA service. We tried it with an HSDPA SIM from T-Mobile and the results were really impressive.

Google News loaded much more quickly on the handset's browser than we've experienced on non-super 3G handsets. On a speed test using the phone's built-in browser we got a real life download speed of 324.5Kbps, which isn't bad. When we used the phone as a modem for our laptop, however, we got a far higher speed rating of 1.1Mbps, which is faster than some people's ADSL broadband connections.

The audio quality during calls was also good, with the handset sounding crisp and sharp. Despite the phone's slimline design, the built-in speaker is quite loud and worked very well in speakerphone mode.

Camera phones rarely produce stunning snaps, and in this regard the Maxx is pretty much par for the course. The pictures from the 2-megapixel camera are reasonably sharp, but the colours tend to look slightly washed out. It's lacking autofocus, too, so you have to be careful to avoid blur. That said, it does have an LED flash, so you can get viewable results in low light.

Motorola says the battery is good for around 380 hours on standby and five hours of talk time. We had to charge it after three days of use, but we were using it for a lot of battery intensive tasks, such as 3G downloads and music playback over Bluetooth.

The Maxx's closest competitor is the super-3G Z560 from Samsung. Both phones are remarkably similar, right down to the three touch-sensitive music buttons on the front. We found the Samsung's menu system easier to use, although the Maxx feels like a sturdier handset, but in truth there's very little to choose between them.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Kate Macefield