Droid X Review
So I’ve had a few days to mess with my new Droid X on Verizon Wireless. I was on AT&T with the iPhone 3GS, and let me tell you I couldn’t wait to get rid of AT&T. I just wanted to go over my initial thoughts and impressions and open up the gates to comments.
As a Phone
First of all the Droid X is a cell phone, and it needs to be treated as such. I found the voice quality to be VERY good. I heard the other end very crisp and clear, most likely from the help of the noise cancellation microphone on top of the device. The other end also said they heard me very well too. The speaker phone can be very loud if the volume is turned up all the way, but you do start to get some cracking once it is up all the way. The little hump where the camera is helps with the speakerphone volume by elevating the speaker just slightly off whatever you have the phone resting on. The text messaging app was very iPhone-like having little bubbles for conversations which was a nice cosmetic touch. For any of you who know the Android OS isn’t quite as visually appealing as the iPhone OS, but it is still very much as functional if not more so, but I’ll get more into that later on.
Data Rates
Verizon’s data speeds may not be quite as fast as AT&T’s, but you have much more 3G coverage than AT&T and I found myself constantly in 3G with almost no loss of connection whereas I was dropping connections at least 3 or 4 times a day with AT&T if even for a minute. My downloads topped around 1500 kbps and uploads around 700 kbps which really isn’t bad at all, and is 100% acceptable for most internet browsing, standard quality video watching.
Apps
Let’s face it, the Droid X is a cell phone, but it’s almost a secondary computer. Apps are extremely useful and transform what used to make calls and text messages into something completely different. The Android market isn’t as big as the App Store for the iPhone, but basically any function you can find in the App Store you can find in the Android market. I will say this, the Facebook App for the iPhone is MUCH better than it is for Android, but the contact-integration within Facebook and Android is amazing. The Droid X comes pre-loaded with what they call the “Social Networking” App which I’ve read reviews and some people weren’t a fan and some people like it compared to the previous versions of Motorola software called Motoblur. Personally I like it to some extent. I like it as the widget (more on widgets later), but I don’t really use it as the actual app. I use the app created by Facebook. Also something to note, I didn’t test this but I did run into several other reviews about it, make sure you don’t sync your contacts with the official Facebook app AND the Motorola provided app as you will duplicate contacts, and if you’re like me that will cause huge problems. The same thing goes with Twitter, but I use the official Twitter app exclusively, because it is an amazing app on it’s own. Google Maps Navigation is AMAZING and there is no other way of describing it. It has pin-point accuracy and provides a very nice view with free traffic updates, you simply can’t go wrong with free navigation. I’ve used stock Android builds before and one thing I was really disappointed with was that I couldn’t move my Email messages to different folders, and there was no multiple message selecting. I am very happy to report that Motorola’s version of the Email app takes care of this and you can select multiple messages and delete or move them to folders. This was very important to me as I organize my Exchange mailbox by sender. The music player app just works, there isn’t much more to say about it than that. It’s not as pretty as the iPod app for the iPhone, but it works, and it works well. I don’t want to get much into 3rd party apps, but there are a plethora of them, and most of the one’s I’ve tried have been built with quality. There is one thing about Android that could be it’s best feature, but also it’s worst. Android is a very open platform meaning you can chose to install anything that you want on to your device, but this also means that not everything is quality-controlled, one of my biggest gripes about the iPhone is this limitation that you can’t install what you want even if it isn’t “Apple-approved”. This is awesome for Android that you can do this, but you have to be careful to make sure you know what you’re installing before you install it. Say you wanted to install a 3rd party keyboard, you better know for sure that the company isn’t capturing your keystrokes. Like I said it’s one of Android’s best and worst features.
Camera
The Droid X is fitted with an 8MP still photos shot and a 720p camcorder, that means you can actually take high definition video on your cell phone. Cool huh? I thought so too. The camera takes some pretty nice shots as far as I’m concerned, no it’s not going to replace your super expensive DSLR, but it does do a pretty good job. I have a few still shots and a few videos that I’ll post here. Not really much more to say other than what I can show you. I’ll show more about the actual interface in my video review.
Kitties Playing (Low Light with LED Light ON)
Random Shots outside (second video has noise cancellation on)
And Some Pictures (From Picasa)
http://picasaweb.google.com/andy.p.meyers/DroidXTest#
Now you have to bear with me, I am in no way a photographer so you’re not going to get amazing quality shots from me either way, hand me a $1000 camera and I wouldn’t know what to do with it honestly. But these are coming from an average camera user.
Hardware
The obvious first thing you notice about this phone is that it is big, 4.3 inch LCD 480×854 resolution is pretty sweet. I have big hands and I have no issue using it. Someone with smaller hands might be a little different though. For it’s size it feels amazingly light, though raw specs don’t say so it actually feels lighter than the iPhone to me, but I have a feeling it’s because of its weight distribution. It has a slight hump on the top of the phone where the camera is which gives it a very nice hold. It’s got 8 hardware buttons: the power button on the top, volume rocker (volume up/down) and camera button on the right, and on the front-bottom of the phone it has the Android buttons in order from left to right: menu, home, back, and search. It has three input/output ports, a micro USB port for charging/transferring files, a mini HDMI port which I haven’t had the privilege to use yet (both on the left of the device), and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top of the device which actually doubles as a FM radio antenna with headphones plugged in, and this actually worked very well! The phone has 3 microphones, the standard one on the bottom of the phone for talking and narrative mode for shooting videos, a mic on the top for noise cancellation (which worked very well for both call quality and eliminating wind noise in video), and one on the back for shooting video. Two speakers the standard call speaker, and a speaker on the back for playing whatever you want/speaker phone. The phone has a 1GHZ TI OMAP processor which I’ve actually found to be speedier than the 1GHZ Snapdragon found in a bunch of the HTC phones, and 512MB of RAM on board (which could help with that speediness).
Overall
I’m very happy with this phone, and I’m very happy with Verizon’s network. It’s not perfect, nor is any phone. Android in general is much less polished that iOS, but it’s functionality is there and above. The battery life isn’t spectacular, but I wasn’t expecting it to be. I have several widgets running and I still manage to squeeze out a full day which really isn’t that bad when I think about it. They’re supposed to release an extended battery later this year, and I may consider getting that. The overall fluidness and speed of the phone is pretty amazing, definitely no complaints there, and I can’t wait to see what Android 2.2 Froyo will bring to the mix considering it’s MUCH faster than 2.1. Hopefully within the week I’ll be posting a video review that way you can actually see the phone in action. I may throw some updates into the mix here and will definitely let you know via Facebook/Twitter if I do so!