The KRZR K3 is the second model in the KRZR line after the KRZR K1, and is followed by a couple of remakes of the K1, namely the K1m and the K1 Gold. The K1m is an EV-DO and CDMA phone made primarily for the American market.The KRZR K3 is a 3G phone with a 2megapixel main camera and is available in two shades of grey. They are Dark Pearl Gray and Lustrous Stone Gray.The KRZR K3 is a slimmer version of the RAZR form factor. It is essentially a smaller clamshell, and is rather more pleasant to the eye than the wider RAZR. The front of the phone has a shiny, reflective finish while the back battery cover has a duller tone.The main speaker is at the bottom of the back cover. The button on the right side is the camera shortcut key, while the volume toggle and a smart key are on the left side. The smart key is set to messaging by default.
The USB charger port is on the left side of the device and an eyelet for the lanyard is built into the hinge that joins both halves of the phone.
Software/Messaging
The RIZR uses a 3x4 grid of icons as its menu. The menu is brought up easily enough but the SCREEN 3 application is a pain that cannot be turned off easily. It is almost as though the device is forcing you to connect to GPRS and download something.This one had Yahoo Go on the menu instead of Google as found in the RIZR Z3. It shows that in the last year, Internet applications have increasingly become integral to handset manufacturers, as evidenced by the placement of the icon as the first icon on the menu.
The iTAP is still terrible, in all the years of its existence. It is turned on by default and that is quite irritating as you will have to scrabble around in the menus to turn it off. Camera/Video
The KRZR K3 has a 2.0 megapixel camera as its main camera. There is also a secondary VGA camera located at the bottom right of the screen. This one serves to project your image on your friend¡¦s phone when you are making a 3G video call.
The K3 has a 8x digital zoom, and the on-screen controls for the camera are now transparent so that you can see behind the graphic of the control on the screen. I like the colour feature that permits you to add many colour filters to your camera, just like with some professional cameras. You can set your pictures to tint in red, blue, green or yellow. You can even set it to plain black & white or simply invert the colours for a view like the negative of the film. We found that if you held the phone on its side, with the camera hotkey facing upwards to shoot a picture in landscape mode, the options key ended up in a really silly place that you could not get to with any of your fingers. Well, you could if you had large hands like mine, but it felt really uncomfortable and silly to do so.
The other thing is, when you close the phone, you can still use the main camera by pressing down on the camera hotkey for a while. However, the viewfinder shows the picture upside down when held in landscape mode, although it displayed quite alright in portrait mode. And then, you can¡¦t turn off the camera in the closed-clamshell state, and you must flip open the phone to turn off the camera.
It was so disconcerting to find the camera behaving so oddly that we nearly forgot to tell you about the red light that flashes on the outside of the phone when it is in camera mode. There is no way to turn this off and likewise, no way to take surreptitious pictures because the subject will be able to see the flashing red light. Connectivity
This phone has Bluetooth, but does not support infrared. You can also sync to the computer via USB and there is an application called MotoSync that lets you keep files on both phone and computer current.
One thing we found here was that the phone needs to have a memory card in the slot before it will accept computer files transferred through the data cable. This leads us to conclude that the computer sees the phone like a card reader without the card. This was without installing anything from the CD, although the computer was able to detect the KRZR K3 as a removable hard disk.
This K3 is a tri-band device and it also supports 3G UMTS and 3.5G HSDPA. The GPRS goes up to Class 12.
