The majority of Smartphones today do many of the same things – albeit in slightly different formats – depending largely on their operating system. And the more they do, the more power they consume. The challenge manufacturers continue to face is how to differentiate their products without compromising the phone’s expected performance.

Selecting a mobile phone can be as difficult as the proverbial “kid in the candy store” whose parents said “chose one – and only one”. There are so many variables to take into account, including battery life, screen size (for typing messages and reading text), camera quality, durability, network (coverage and speed) and more.

Motorola Australia is releasing a new phone today – the RAZR HD – that certainly ticks a lot of the features boxes. Exclusive to Telstra (until 31 December, 2012), the RAZR HD boasts a 2500mAh battery that provides up to an amazing 16 hours talk time, and up to 250 hours standby (yes that’s right – 10 days standby!) [1]

SMARTACTIONS^TM – The Motorola Killer App?

The RAZR HD features SMARTACTIONS. With this unique app, you can automate everyday tasks, so your Smartphone is optimised for your life. SMARTACTIONS is intuitive. As you go about your day, it learns how you interact with your phone and makes suggestions that help you spend less time managing your Smartphone and more time enjoying it.  Examples include:

Driver Safety: Enable Drive Smart rule (either by connecting the RAZR HD to the Vehicle Dock or Bluetooth Headset, or via a home screen widget) and the RAZR HD knows you are driving – launching turn by turn navigation, announcing the names of incoming callers, auto-replying to incoming texts with a preselected text message, and increasing the ringer volume.

Energy Saving: SMARTACTIONS has a battery saving setting that recognises when the RAZR HD is idle. By enabling the Battery Saver rule, the RAZR HD will put those functions not being used into a form of sleep mode, whilst still allowing you to receive calls and text messages.

Work or Play: SMARTACTIONS comes to the party: No matter where you are, you can set the RAZR HD to behave accordingly. For example, if you want your RAZR HD to attach to Bluetooth when you arrive at the office , use Location as a trigger, the SMARTACTIONS will either use your current location (if you are at work) or you can add the address from your contacts, tell SMARTACTIONS to enable Bluetooth, and your RAZR HD will automatically connect to your Bluetooth headset if it is powered on.

Do Not Disturb – unless…..: If you need some quiet time, but still need to take calls from family or your boss, SMARTACTIONS allows you to keep your phone on silent (or low volume), except calls from  your identified special contacts. Trigger Incoming Calls to select the number(s) you want, and increase the Ringer Volume. By linking your calendar, the Meeting trigger ensures you do not get interrupted.

Time and Place for Everything: some companies do not encourage employees to be on social networking or personal email whilst working. SMARTACTIONS is a great way to manage this. Trigger Location, and select Background Data – setting it to Disable – and the RAZR HD will help keep you focused on the tasks you are supposed to be doing. Manual updates are still available, and you can still perform other internet related activity whilst in this mode. Once you leave the designated “social media free” zone, you can catch up on all the news in your life.

Time Out: I’m one of those people who never turns their phone off overnight (and I am not going to debate the pros and cons of this here). SMARTACTIONS Sleep rule will set your RAZR HD to silent when you are ready to go to sleep, only allowing your designated VIP contact calls to ring.

The more you use SMARTACTIONS the more you will want to use it. This feature alone is, in my opinion, a strong reason to consider the RAZR HD.

Let me briefly touch on some of the other great features Motorola have packed into the RAZR HD.

The RAZR HD is 8.4mm thin, sports a DuPont Kevlar fibre back, Corning Gorilla Glass and is splash resistant thanks to a water-repellent nanocoating. When in Telstra 4G coverage areas, you can start streaming video in seconds, play multiplayer games without lag, and upload photos in a flash.

The vibrant 4.7”, 16m colour Super AMOLED Touch Screen provides greater detail and sharper, clearer images, providing more true to life colours for the images you capture with the 8 megapixel camera.

The RAZR HD is NFC (Near Field Communications) enabled – which means you can share your contacts, web pages, apps and more by a simple touch and tap to another RAZR HD or Android NFC enabled device.

Related links:

• All about SMARTACTIONS