It’s outstanding how the mobile market has evolved in the past 10 years. Having a mobile phone several years ago used to be a very prestigious and handy communication solution. Mainly it was explicitly for business purposes.

Taking your calls on the road, finalizing your deals over the long airport delays, made many lives easier and most importantly started slowly eliminating those pagers that kept beeping every 10 minutes and making you run to the closest land line phones.

Sure it wasn’t cheap paying 50 cents and more a minute but it was actually becoming a trend. As time went by, more and more wireless providers started making their appearance on the market with affordable plans, making it finally possible to be able to carry a phone with you. Just by being able to reach anyone at anytime was definitely getting very attractive.

Similar to computers; they used to be big and very expensive, not even taking in mind the monthly fees. Today we find dozens of different wireless providers and a few dozen of different companies providing phones in different sizes, colors, features and price tags.

I still remember when I jumped in the bandwagon and decided to get my self a mobile phone. It wasn’t because I needed one that badly, but most importantly because my provider released the Ericsson T28; a tinny GSM phone that I simply felt in love with. It was small, stylish and most importantly, it made everyone wonder how that tinny product could do so many things. Not only could you place and receive calls but also use it to organize your week, calculate your earnings and play the built in games. Sure it was expensive, but at that point I simply said to my self, I need one.

Today it’s not a wonder anymore, you can manage your emails while on the road, surf the internet, share pictures between friends, listen to music and much more.

In September I was lucky enough once again to receive a sample of what is supposed to be the next generation of the classical V3 RAZR, the KRZR K1. The unit shares a very similar design with the original RAZR; however it spots a much narrower and longer design that I must admit is more comfortable than the RAZR. Just by putting these two units next to each other you can immediately realize that the RAZR looks a bit over sized!

Currently only the cosmic blue model will be available for the GSM version of this phone. I would call it more a translucent mirror blue. At night the color of the phone is blue and during day light the color is clearly more Indigo blue. Not to forget mentioning; the mirror finish definitely gives this product a very unique stylish look.

Built in applications of the KRZR include a calculator, date book, alarm clock, dialling services, activation list, voice recorder and a world clock.

Accessible smart buttons are located on the main body in order to change your ring profiles or launch the camera when the phone is not flip open. When flip open, the right and left smart button can be programmed to launch any of your favourite application. The bigger button on the right is used as an up and down control to facilitate the navigation of the menu and volume control.

Battery life of the KRZR is very similar to the RAZR which I would say is above average. We got a total of 110 hours in standby and 3 hours and a half of talk time.

The main internal display features 262,000 colors and a resolution of 176x220 pixels, if not for being smaller in size, its identical to the RAZR V3 technical specifications.

A great improvement over the original RAZR is the KRZR’s built in 2 mega pixel camera and its 8x zoom. The quality of the camera is of course by far superior to the VGA solution on the original RAZR, however don’t expect to replace your digital camera any time soon. The lack of a flash on this product won’t let you create miracles. An interesting feature along the camera is the built in picture editor that let’s you play around the pictures. The camera supports as well up to 25 minutes per clip video recording at maximum CIF resolution.

A neat feature of this new model is the ability to use it as a music player. The package includes a pair of stereo mini USB headphones. Supported audio include MP3, AAC and AAC+ formats with full stereo output. All audio files can also be used a main ring tones.

Onboard memory of the KRZR is 20Mbytes. I would say it’s far from enough if you are planning to take advantage of the high resolution video camera or use it as a mp3 player. Fortunately, the memory can be expanded using a (MicroSD) TransFlash card of up to 2GB in size.