Gadgetory

what's up everyone John rent injure from TechnoBuffalo here with a full review for you of the Motorola Droid 3 if t-mobile's g1 assured us into the Android era Verizon's original Droid brought it to the mainstream so the Droid name has a long legacy of bringing some of the best Android phones out there let's go ahead and see if its third iteration is the charm so let me run through the specs very quickly of the Droid 3 because some stuff has changed here since we last saw the Droid first it now has a 4-inch screen with a resolution of 540 by 960 that's up from 3.7 of the previous generation it's rocket Android 2.3 it's now being powered by a dual-core Tegra 2 processor so that's 1 gigahertz on each core as opposed to the 1 gigahertz TI OMAP on the droid 2 512 megabytes of RAM that's the same on the back it now has an 8 megapixel camera which we'll talk about at length up from 5 it's got that single LED flash now that's not the only camera on here though it's got a point 3 megapixel camera on the front and the rear camera that we just talked about can shoot 1080p video at 9:20 by 1080 so of course that's 1080 at 30 frames per second it's got 16 gigs of storage built in there is a micro SD card slot but it's not going to come with one at least the initial rounds that we've seen have not come with micro SD cards all this extra package comes a little bit of a weight at six point four nine ounces are 184 grams up from the 5.9 six ounces or 168 grams from the Droid One all right all that spec business aside now let's get to the phone review if you watched all the videos that I do on phones I always start out with call quality doesn't matter what the thing has if it's not good making phone calls it's not going to be any use to you as with most Verizon phones call quality has been absolutely outstanding on the Droid 3 during my 20 call tests I had zero drop calls the antenna in here though it was a little bit weaker than I've seen on other devices generally I'm getting five salad bars everywhere I go here I saw that drop down one to two bars now certainly using bars as the only be all metric for signal strength not always hunt percent accurate but certainly here in this case it looks like there's something you want to keep in mind if you're in a fringe verizon area you might want to try the phone first before you bring it home but if you're blanketed with coverage won't be an issue speaker quality is actually quite loud here through that grille on the back so if you rely on speakerphone you're not going to have much of a problem alright so let's talk about the design because there's a lot of things they're different here so of course you've got that four inch screen you still have that sort of telltale droid hump that we've seen on the droid one and the Droid 2 you've got that same slide-out keyboard which is not spring-assisted but now we've got some differences here we've got a full number across the top all right if you look at the keyboard on the droid to go ahead and sort of put these here top and bottom so you can see I was not the biggest fan of the keyboard here on the Droid 2 or the droid one didn't have much key throw to it they had the sort of membrane issue feel it didn't really feel very comfortable to type on you look at the keyboard here now on the Droid 3 it still has that same membrane sort of feel to it but the keys definitely have a bit more throw that just means a little bit more classy and you can see it's sort of the additional Clackamas even when you push it you can hear it a little bit more you can see some of the animations here on the software to it we'll talk about in just a moment so the keyboard is definitely improved here I didn't find it to be the most enjoyable keyboard experience out there it certainly wasn't bad if you like the landscape orientation for keyboards it's gonna be a pretty decent option a little useless to me as is for wedding navigation certainly it's better than what we saw on the droid one but too tough to type on in my opinion you can also get in doing your navigation with your finger so here's the keyboard alright so next let's talk about the design and the buttons that the thing has so on the left hand side microUSB for charging an HDMI out that's sort of a new addition to look at the left sided advice from the droid - you'll notice that the buttons are the porch rather have been moved and certainly have HDMI right down below what I'm tired and trying to charge is saying I kept trying to plug the mini USB port or micro USB port rather into the HDMI it's right next to each other maybe that's just me and on the right hand side there's some differences here - so the volume rockers in the same spot but a bit different buttons direction and we're missing one button right here for the camera that is not going to be here bit of an annoyance actually I liked launching the camera with a dedicated button some things you're going to need to get used to I will go ahead and sort of push that off on the back things like a bit different here as well it's almost a it looks like a more solid piece than we had here on the droid - chosen to join one had its own problems with its backing so here's the - there's the three you can see it looks a bit more a bit more solid and the phone feels a bit more solid and with that cell and this comes a bit of extra weight difference and you definitely feel that here with the Droid 3 it all thing up to your head doesn't feel bad but you definitely know they were holding a heavier phone if the keyboard is something you absolutely have to have you know then that weights can be worth it to you if that weights something that you can do without maybe you don't necessarily need a physical keyboard the Droid X 2 is probably going to be a good phone for you to look at because both of those do not have 4G LTE or radios built in but something that we're definitely going to talk about in just a few minutes all right so let's talk now about the software hooray we have no motoblur at least motorola is not calling it motoblur obviously there are some custom skinning going on here but we didn't have to sign in to any sort of motoblur account when you turn on the phones which is always awesome and you can sort of turn off some of the features here so there's a lot of animations on this thing you can see them when I scroll from screen to screen when I open up the applications there's just all kinds of little stuff that go on here that slows down the speed of the phone unfortunately not a giant amount but yes like cognizant that you're waiting for the informations to finish while applications can and let me show you some loading applications here for example going to egg with the camera since you don't have dedicated camera button you go ahead and open that sucker up there goes there's a little bit of a lag so phone settings will go ahead and now you can snap a picture I'll go ahead and snap something here tries to focus and then it snaps so let me there it go so let me just take a picture of something to give it maybe more of a fair chance so it's already been opened we know it's sort of sitting there in memory let's go ahead open it one more time open up the camera application it goes a little bit quicker let's say I want a picture of a pen so I'll go ahead and get that pen in there let's go ahead and select it so it's not sort of the fastest camera in the world it's not the slowest I've been reports so that it was absolutely laggy in the camera Department not necessarily true it's not a speed demon when trying to launch a camera application but it's not the slowest either something to sort of keep in mind also on the software Department this isn't really unique to the Droid 3 I thought I'd show anyway you have a totally redesigned marketplace here you see quadrant which I'll talk about in a moment did I download and go back home here's what the new marketplace looks like kind of neat you can download books movies games and apps today you can get all your movies here right on your device and on that 16 gigs of internal storage or if you want to get a micro SD card and go ahead and do that as well I decided only seen this many times before so I thought you guys might want to see it alright so now let's talk about speed this is dual core Tegra 2 this is all about speed and all about performance huge omission for me obviously and probably for you as well is not having a 4G LTE radio well John you're probably saying 4G is not important to everybody well if you're getting this phone right now and you're gonna lock yourself into a two-year contract it's not important to you now but it might be important to you and say it years or a year and a half you might not have LTE coverage where you are right now but sort of as those two years progress Verizon's got a really aggressive LTE build-out map and you might be blanketed in 4G LTE in you know six months and you might wish that you had a phone I could do the faster speeds so really be aware of that when you're buying this phone if you don't think under any chance you're going to want LT even okay look at the Droid 3 if you think there's a small chance that you might want it your best bet is going to be to wait alright so let me show you the speed to some applications here let's see how quickly or slowly things launch answer to make things fair I'll go ahead and go to manage apps we'll go ahead and see what's open here so you guys can see and see what's running there we go I can see a ram what's being used not being used not many applications you're running most of the stuff that the phone needs to run all right so let's go ahead and open some stuff up and open things that I haven't opened before it's go ahead and try something like books boom take your knives agent turned off we'll go ahead and keep getting it off so books opened relatively quickly H opening it again now it's been sort of stored fast let's go ahead and open see what else you got here let's go ahead and map navigation we can ask you for that stuff but it opens pretty quickly as is true with most Tegra 2 devices I've seen things open very very very fast but you know how does it benchmark if you're getting a dual-core phone you obviously care about speed benchmark certainly isn't the end-all be-all and quadrant which is one I use to test might not be the most accurate testing in your book but it's consistent with how I test all of my phones on the quadroon score on this particular phone is 1670 so by no means setting the world on fire with its dual core speed so definitely another thing to keep in mind alright let's go and take a look at the browsers and for talking about speed one of the gripes have had in the past with some Android phones is that the browser's been a bit slow not necessarily slow to load but slow with panning and slow with pinching and zooming so we got TechnoBuffalo here we'll go ahead and do a refresh that's correct it's a Wi-Fi of course it's been loaded up here on the past isn't necessarily a browser speed test of my Wi-Fi network I just want to show you that sort of a fresh load all right so you go ahead and let it finish up here as its loading generally you should be able to scroll and I am not able to do anything there we go so now I can do my scrolling and I don't have that need a checkerboard pattern as I as I scroll along which is nice and pinched the zoom here is very very smooth and really modern Android devices have had much quicker pinch-to-zoom seriously as I mentioned how smooth it it seems to be slowing down so flash is turned on so it certainly accounts for a bit of the slowdown go ahead and can see what that looks like enough even with flash turned on it's not bad with flash turned off you're going to get certainly improved battery life but to talk about you know get a little smoother pinch-to-zoom but take my word for it here that it is very smooth and heals pretty well here on the screen rotation times if I go ahead and get on its side so to rotate there we go rotate you have to have to ask it nicely and it'll do its little rotation for you ah battery Oh Tegra 2 and your battery it is a 1540 milliamp hour battery life and you can guess what I'm going to say verizon says you're gonna get nine point six hours of talktime and 300 hours of standby time push ah I say to that push ah if you want to get this phone you definitely want to want to get either the inductive charging back for it so you can just plop it on something and plop it on with charging pads and let it charge you don't want to get an extra battery or carry a cord with you because battery life not so good let me give you a synopsis of my usage and maybe yours might bury I've got two gmail accounts checking and pulling stuff in every 30 minutes definitely making about two hours of phone calls connected to bluetooth in my car for about say two and a half to three hours per day pretty heavy internet browsing this phone was dead as a doornail come about 3:30 so if you don't use your phone that much maybe you might get through a full day but definitely don't think you're gonna get through a full day or even two days without having a charge this phone cuz it just ain't gonna happen so I recommend this phone there's nothing bad about the phone there's nothing screaming saying oh you shouldn't get this you shouldn't get that they shouldn't get this but there's not a lot screaming that says you should get this phone Ryan's got a really outstanding lineup Avenged songs and they have an outstanding event Android phones even coming out I look at something like the jury charged LG revolution those phones that are packing 4G now they might not have a physical keyboard so a physical keyboard is what you need and you want those speeds you know this is going to be a decent choice physical keyboards what you want they don't necessarily have to have the dual core you might want to look at something like the Droid Pro you're gonna get a smaller package and you're still going to get that same keyboard if your heart is set on this phone its heart set on the phone for a reason it's gonna be probably difficult to dissuade you but you might want to wait until the Droid Bionic comes at least take a look at it see what's gonna be worth it to you that you're gonna get dual-core and you're gonna get 4G LTE it's really not gonna have a full physical keyboard and as I mentioned the keyboard here is not necessarily the best keyboard I've ever used it's usable and I know I get a lot of flack for this something like to be HTC status here has an incredible keyboard keyboards bad is usable as a BlackBerry Bold 97-80 you know in the blackberry torch and the rest of the BlackBerry lineup so it's usable it's fine for my money I prefer keyboard in the court be a portrait orientation but you know that's a personal preference so the phone's blah it does what you expect it to do doesn't do it overly well timed it really bad it just sort of works if you want to bone that's just gonna work you want to get your mom or dad a phone you know decent choice so that's a little bit of a wishy-washy type type review for you anyway guys hope you enjoyed I am John Ritter from TechnoBuffalo leave all your questions down below or things you want to see about the Droid 3 we'll be doing some head-to-head with other dual-core phones and non dual-core phones I'll help you make your best phone buying choice I am John Retton German TechnoBuffalo and I'll see you in the next video bye-bye you