Motorola Droid Bionic: Full-Featured, Fast, and Expensive

Information technology feels As if we've waited an eternity (good, about nine months) for the Motorola Droid Bionic ($300 with a two-year contract as of Sept 7, 2011) to come to Verizon, just the dual-core 4G phone has finally arrived. While you might cringe at the heavy price, the dual-core TI OMAP processor paired with Verizon's superspeedy LTE meshing makes for one fast phone. But the Technology waterfall short in its presentation and call quality, making that high up Mary Leontyne Pric tag seem a bit excessive.

(Editor in chief's note: We will be lab-examination the Droid Applied science finished the next few days, and we wish update this review–and mayhap the score–depending connected the results.)

High-Quality Designing, Disappointing Display

When you pick up the Bionic, you'll immediately notice its high-stepped-superior feel and sturdy construction. The dark gray, soft, rubberized battery cover is nice in the hand, and the Corning Gorilla Methamphetamine face off gives it a high-tech flavour. The Bionic's design isn't as fun as that of the Photon 4G (Sprint), which has a futuristic, angular look after. It's somewhat blocky, and it feels a little bombastic (though admittedly my hands are a little small). Measuring 5.00 by 2.63 by 0.43 inches, the Droid Bionic is the slimmest LTE phone on Verizon. IT weighs 5.6 ounces, slightly lighter than the Photon.

The 4.3-inch qHD (Quarter Piping Definition) display isn't atomic number 3 razor-sharp as we expect a 960-by-540-picture element screen to be. The images I crocked from my Facebook profile looked a fiddling grainy, with a svelte bluish tinct. I could also interpret a grid of dots in the image–even without zooming in. Unfortunately, this isn't the forward time we've taken issue with a Motorola telephone set's exhibit. The Photon also had a flimsy bluish tint, and the Droid 3's qHD display suffered from the dots issue. I was affected, however, with how sharp the text looked in the web browser and in Gmail.

Software: Well-stacked for Business and Entertainment

Like the Photon 4G and the other thermal phones of the fall, the Droid Bionic runs the latest version of Android, 2.3.4 (Gingerbread). It also runs Motorola's customised MotoBlur widgets, including the social networking convenience, which aggregates all of your account profiles into a lonesome view on your habitation screen. The widgets are resizable (à la Android Honeycomb), and you butt scroll through them; in the calendar widget, for example, you can scroll through a total day's worth of events instead than viewing one issue at a clock time.

Unlike other Motorola phones, though, the Bionic is non tied to the MotoBlur cloud service. Or else, you contract an app called ZumoCast, which lets you approach remote files on your PC without having to upload or sync your files. You can get at everything from PowerPoint files to your iTunes playlists connected your Engineering science. Even though the Droid Bionic has plenty of storage (1GB of RAM, 16GB of happening-board memory, and a preinstalled 16GB MicroSD scorecard), I determine it good to be able to access videos, documents, photos, and other media files without having to download them to the device operating theatre upload them to a cloud service.

Public presentation

The Droid Bionic takes about 43 seconds to trip out fully. Untold of that time is consumed away a Verizon Droid logo animation, which plays while the telephone is lading. The graphics look into neat, only the fact that a telephone set this powerful takes so eight-day to iron heel is sort of surprising. Once you're up and running, in operation the phone is smooth sailing throughout. In my tests, flipping through the Bionic's menus was very fast with no lag Oregon stuttering. The browser besotted Vane pages chop-chop, over Badger State-Fi and 4G. Finished Verizon's LTE network, PCWorld.com loaded in 18 seconds, and the image-heavy TheBoldItalic.com loaded in an impressive 8.3 seconds. Over Wi-Fi, PCWorld.com loaded in a quick 3.3 seconds.

We also tested the phone exploitation Qualcomm's new benchmarking app, Vellamo, just now to view how a TI processor would fare against its competitors. The Droid Bionic earned a seduce of 715, which places it below the HTC Sensation and EVO 3D (both of which are powered by Qualcomm chipsets) but above the Motorola Atrix 4G (which uses an Nvidia Tegra 2 chip). We take these scores with a grain of salt since Qualcomm manufactures the app, but the information is absorbing to compare.

Call quality over Verizon's meshwork was uneven. My friends' voices sounded hollow and blown out, as if they were talking overly some the speaker. Sometimes I saved IT hard to understand them, and I had to adjust the volume on almost all song. My friends, along the other hand, were more irrefutable. I successful a fewer of my calls adjacent to a loud generator, but my friends rumored that they could not hear it in the background.

We're still conducting our battery-liveliness tests on the Droid Bionic, so we'll update with a choke-full report once we're finished. Battery life with regard to Verizon's 4G phones has been a hot stock, so we plan on investigating the Droid Bionic's battery as good as possible. According to Motorola, the Droid Bionic offers 650 transactions of talk clip and 200 hours of standby time, and takes 3.5 hours to obtain a loaded battery guardianship. It has the largest battery of all Verizon LTE devices, at 1735 mAh.

Good Television camera, Great Gallery

Like almost of the latest and greatest smartphones, the Droid Bionic has an 8-megapixel camera. It can shoot adequate to 1080p HD video, also; it's the first Verizon LTE phone to glucinium able to do so. When I met with Motorola, I asked the product managers why the Droid Bionic took so tenacious to number to market. Their reply? Among other features, 1080p was added to the phone after Motorola's initial CES announcement.

We've never been blown away aside the fancy quality on Motorola cameras–the colorless balance tends to equal disconnected, liberal photos and video a blue tint. The Photon's camera was slightly better than those of different Motorola phones, such equally the Droid 3 and the Triumph, so I had rather high expectations for the Bionic's camera. Thankfully, it met my expectations: Although the Droid Bionic's camera isn't the best I've seen (that honor goes to the T-Mobile MyTouch 4G Slide), I was pleased with the bite, color accuracy, and brightness of my indoor and outdoorsy photos.

Telecasting capture was quite good. The Droid Applied science's camera handled action without any pixelation or artifacting. Color looked good, and the microphone did a dependable job of handling audio.

The enhanced gallery displays photos from your own library, in online libraries (Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, and finally Picasa), or in your friends' libraries on assorted social networks and on DLNA servers.

Accessories Galore

Same the Photon and the Atrix, the Droid Bionic can hook raised to a special dock that lets you memory access your speech sound in "webtop" mode. When you get in touch to the webtop dock, you can access the total Firefox browser as swell as a slew of specially made productiveness apps. Certain apps (such as Angry Birds) can play at full screen on a larger show. The Droid Engineering science has all sorts of accessories available for it, including the Motorola Lapdock ($300, like the one that was publicised with the Atrix), a standard pier ($40), a fomite navigation dock ($40), and an HD station ($100). We'll be taking a closer look at the accessories in the next a couple of days, so stay tuned.

Bottom Line

Although we're inactive wrap up our lab tests of the Droid Bionic, it is condom to suppose that this is one of Verizon's strongest phones available right now. The build choice is fantabulous, the software is sporty and intuitive, and the addition of ZumoCast is intense. The exhibit, however, is a big disappointment. The whole speed of the Droid Bionic is almost enough to make up for that shortcoming, but the high toll makes the headphone a tough sell. On the plus face, if you're upgrading from a basic handset or sport phone to the Bionic, you'll get a $100 gift card toward your Verizon bill or any accessories. That's a solid incentive, but it seems suchlike a big leaping to go from a earpiece that can only make calls to this dual-core, 4G beast. It might be more fair to extend such an offer to 3G Droid owners or, at the very least, to owners of the original Droid.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/482568/motorola_droid_bionic_full_featured_fast_and_expensive.html

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