Review: Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX for Verizon Wireless
Camera
Though the RAZR MAXX doesn't have a dedicated camera button, the camera can be accessed from the lock screen. It launches quickly. The camera controls are nicely arranged and easy to figure out.
There's a focusing box in the middle of the screen, but the RAZR MAXX also includes touch-to-focus if you want to be specific. There's a slide for zooming (and the volume key doubles as a zoom key). Then there's a too-small button in the corner to access the Droid RAZR MAXX's full settings.
Press this tiny button and a little drawer slides out that provides access to six different control panels: Settings, Effects, Scenes, Shooting Modes, Brightness, and Flash. There's plenty to choose from when it comes to adjusting the camera's behavior. The effects are limited to colors, but the scenes range from portrait to landscape, and from close-ups to sunsets. It has an easy panorama mode for taking shots of wide vistas.
The RAZR MAXX's camera performs much better than that of the original RAZR. It is faster to focus, and taking pictures is less cumbersome. The whole process is streamlined and you can shoot multiple pictures faster. Most of the improvements come with tweaked autofocus behavior.
Gallery
The Droid RAZR MAXX makes use of the newer Motorola gallery application that we've seen on other high-end Motorola Android devices in recent months.
The gallery segregates photo libraries, with the default view set to the images shared by your Facebook friends. The images appear as cards floating in a carousel and you can scroll through them sideways. It's a breeze to add a comment, or open the photo in the Facebook app for full interactivity.
There are buttons below this carousel that open the camera roll, your image library, your online accounts (defaults to Picasa and Facebook), and DLNA devices. Its an interesting way to view images, and it places an emphasis on the social nature of sharing pictures with your friends and family. You can upload/share with tons of photo/social services, and even add comments to your own photos. The gallery can be set to support automatic uploads, which means photos will be sent to the one social network of your choice automatically, in the background.
As for the main gallery of camera photos, it lays things out in a grid of thumbnails and supports slide shows. The editing features are robust. The RAZR MAXX can adjust effects, colors, and brightness, as well as crop, rotate, flip (horizontal or vertical), and even resize the image.
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