Overview: it is a great shaver for shaving, but it is marred by some questionable design decisions. Background: It is replacing my 9 years-old Braun Contour 5. I have been using the grooming products from the big three (Braun, Philips, Panasonic) for years. Shaving: It shaves like a dream; it most certainly shaves better than my old Contour even when it had new blades, and I think it shaves better than shavers from Panasonic/Philips I have used in the past. My facial hairs are not very coarse or dense; but they are very curvy, and can grow into every other directions -- lots of shavers struggle with this, but this one seems to handle it with ease. For the "core" purpose of shaving facial hairs, this is easily 5 stars. Builds&Appearance: Its build feels nice enough. I have mixed feeling about its appearance -- I think its overuse of silver/chrome parts cheapen its appearance. I am not too fond of the combination of the big shaving head and the narrow "neck" -- it makes me think of the Chimera product of Philips neck and Panasonic head, if that makes sense. Battery Life: I am not commenting here, since this doesn't really matter for how I used this product. Usability: It is a shaver, it shouldn't be too complicated to use -- and it is not. However, I don't think it is as intuitive as it should be. Additionally, it comes with one of these trendy "text-free" manuals, which fails at the basic purpose of manuals -- I am sure I have read some post-modern philosophical treaties which were easier to comprehend than this "manual". Given that this is a NA product which covers only three languages, I have no idea why they went text-free. Except that it is not really "text-free", as it has plenty of warning texts. SAD. :/ Trimmer: Here comes the worst aspect of this product. Unlike many traditional shavers that has a built-in extendable trimmer, this shaver comes with the "precision trimmer" attachment instead. You are supposed to detach the main "shaver" attachment and attach the "trimmer" attachment whenever you want to use the trimmer. The shaver can also take optional clipper attachments, though these are not in the box. Unfortunately, this approach has major drawbacks. First, it is inconvenient, since you basically have to shuffle the multiple attachment every day instead of simply pushing the extendable trimmer when needed. Second, and more importantly, this shaver makes a rather poor trimmer. The shaving head, by design, is big and wobbly. Unfortunately, you don't want to have "precision trimmer" sitting on top of something big and wobbly -- a trimmer sitting on a big and wobbly base cannot be precise. This trimmer feels terrible to use, especially when trimming the sideburn using my off hand; granted, a minor disability I have on my off-hand wouldn't be helping here; still, a trimmer should not be this difficult to use. I have a separate Panasonic trimmer, so this is not a big issue for me (although I would rather not carry a separate trimmer for a short trip...). However, if you depend on a built-in trimmer on your shaver, I urge you to think twice before getting this shaver. If you are thinking of replacing your trimmer/clipper with this shaver, just don't. There is no need for a shaver to try to be a multi-purpose clipper; it is unfortunate that Braun decided to force a square peg into a round hole by trying to make this otherwise great shaver into some kind of multipurpose clipper.
