Replacing the RAZR2 V9m, the RAZR VE20, doesn’t bring a whole lot of new features to the table. But we appreciate this $99 silver clamshell’s 3.5mm headphone jack and easy access to over-the-air services like Sprint TV and its Sprint Music Store, plus support for turn-by-turn GPS directions and the new NFL Mobile Live application. Just be sure to keep a polishing cloth handy.

Design

The VE20 looks like a rounded, more compact version of the RAZR2 V9m . At 3.6 ounces, it’s also 0.6 ounces lighter and a hair smaller than the V9m, measuring 3.9 x 2.0 x 0.6 inches.

We like the exterior’s matte silver finish and red metallic hinge accents. Like the V9m, the VE20 has a partial touchscreen, which offers haptic feedback when accessing your messages, music, and shortcuts (Bluetooth, My Pics & Videos, Recent History, and Voice Recognition). However, this external LCD is smaller (1.6 inches versus 2 inches), dimmer, and has lower resolution than the V9m (120 x 60 pixels versus 320 x 240 pixels). Our biggest beef with the lid is that it picks up fingerprints too easily.

The 2.2-inch internal display (320 x 240-pixel resolution) is big and bright. The keypad looks strikingly familiar: It’s practically the same one as every RAZR phone we’ve ever seen. We like its brushed silver texture and white backlight, but it, too, picks up smudges in a hurry. We also don’t like how spaced apart the numbers are, which makes one-handed dialing slow.

User Interface

Sprint uses its own Sprint Ahead user interface on the VE20, which was easy to use. The home screen has seven colorful rotating icons for E-mail, Main Menu, Music, My Account, Navigation, On Demand, and TV. The left soft key defaults to Favorites, which quickly launches your favorite Web sites (MySpace and Facebook are already listed) and applications. The right soft key is a shortcut to your contacts.

Multimedia

Unlike the proprietary headphone jack on earlier RAZRs, the VE20 comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack, and audio sounded great through it. While Sprint bundles the VE20 with a 256MB microSD Card, its slot is annoyingly located behind the battery. When songs are playing, album art is displayed on the inside screen; with the clamshell closed, you can view the album art, current track, and time and navigate through songs on the external screen.

We downloaded Shwayze’s “Corona and Lime” in 53 seconds from the Sprint Music Store. That’s not bad—songs usually take about a minute on Verizon Wireless’ network. The tracks cost 99 cents, and Sprint provides the option to buy six tracks for $5.94—which saves you nothing. When you download a song from the music store, you’re able to download a copy to your PC. We downloaded our track after registering, but wished it was a DRM-free MP3 instead of a Windows Media file. On Verizon Wireless, you have to pay a sky-high $1.99 per song, but you get a DRM-free MP3 as well.

Sprint TV lets you access Sprint’s TV channels (E!, Comedy Central, the Weather Channel, NFL network, CBS Mobile, MTV, and more) and Sprint Radio (10 stations). For $5.95 per month, you can subscribe to premium channels such as PIX, which lets you stream full length movies, but you have to watch whatever happens to be playing at the time. We watched The Karate Kid for a few minutes, but the picture was often pixelated or distorted and artifacts were visible. Voices were in sync for the most part, but we encountered small delays about every 5 minutes for a second or two. If you want to view the TV in full screen, you have to hold the phone open and in landscape mode.