Gadgetory

hey guys it's random in a min from pocket now calm and this is the software review of the motorola droid 2 on verizon let's get started so the software on the motorola droid 2 is very similar to what you get on the droid x but of course the screen is a lot smaller on the droid to 3.7 inches compared to 4.3 now the main difference between these two devices besides the form factor is that the joy to is running android 2.2 and the droid x is running android 2.1 so in theory the droid two should be faster at doing everything launching applications browsing the web compared to the droid x because android 2.2 is supposed to be much faster so in a couple of minutes we're going to compare the two in launching applications and browsing the web and see if that claim holds to be true okay so let's talk about the droid 2 so obviously we have a slide out keyboard which means that the home screen can reorient to the proper orientation here and quite smoothly and quickly on my dad so we can go back and forth and it takes sometimes it takes a little bit more than a second but most of the time it happens in about half of a second and even if you go to a home screen that is a little bit more advanced when you slide open the keyboard it still happens very fast and it lines up very nicely so that is a nice thing to have so just like the droid x you get a choice of seven home screens to customize and when you swipe to the right or to the left you get this quick jump on the bottom that lets you quickly jump from home screen 12 home screen 2 and so on and so forth and so we can add motorola widgets and we can add stock android widgets i'm going to take you through some of the motorola widgets that are included on the droid two they're very similar to what you get on the droid x so here we have a simple clock widget we can actually resize all of the motorola widgets which is quite nuts and the function actually changes sometimes when you resize the widgets for example here I've changed the clock widget into a calendar widget just by changing its size so that's really neat so you get these handles and you can make it skinny a little bit wider and you get the point from there then just the variety of shortcuts here on the bottom we have the permanent buttons we've contacts the application launcher and the phone over here on the Left swiping over to the left here we have a google search bar froyo style and we can change what we're actually searching although right now moment have it only set to google and the web going back we have a quick link into our calendar down here we have a messaging application which will open up a widget not the actual mail application to let you quickly preview your email which is nice and i've got some links on the bottom scrolling to the left have some quick toggles for Wi-Fi Bluetooth GPS and airplane mode and they're very visual and they look pretty cool so you swipe them on and let's see how this one looks in landscape pretty good the the toggles actually change design when you go into landscape and that's happening pretty fast which is impressive we can go over here to the weather widget and it's using GPS to see where I am and tell me the weather in the location go back this does have the 3g mobile hotspot capability like the droid x but unfortunately you have to pay an extra twenty dollars a month to get it to work on top of your data plan so don't expect to use this as a 3g Wi-Fi hotspot out of the box although if you root it you may be able to get away with it so let's go back okay and on the left we have nothing so we can add a couple of widgets just kind of play around here so we've already seen these two toggles you've seen the calendar the contact quick task is really awesome and they have this on the droid x as well so we can take a particular contact and we can assign a quick action to them so for example we can have a quick action for text messaging or to email or to call their home so I'm going to just do Twitter and you contact detail just to choose to and then we get these two little offshoots of the contacts so imagine having one of your home screens be assigned to all of your friends and all of your friends have these two little dropdowns one for text messaging and want to call them really awesome way to kind of group together context and be able to perform an action on them in a quick amount of time jump back into the motorola widgets photo view photo widget is just a quick little widget lets you flip through photos I don't have any gallery set up so can't go through that we have a picture frame plus widget which is a little bit more fancy than what you get with the photo widget social networking which is cool ties into multiple services all right now I only have twitter set up so I can click done and I can see what's going on in Twitter if I tap on it it brings up this little widget I can flick through all of the different tweets that have been going on through my account and just kind of look at look at Twitter in a quick and easy way let's delete that there's also of course a widget that lets you update your twitter or facebook status right from your home screen that's called social status we have something called sticky note which is a way to remind you to do certain things which is quite nice and also whether what you've seen and the Wi-Fi toggle and one more thing there's a news widget which will allow you to add custom feeds so let's say we want to add the RSS from pocket now calm and by the way we do have an on-screen keyboard here which is a pretty good it's it's very much similar in functionality to the stock android keyboard you would get on say the google nexus one but i mean a little device like this you probably should be using a slide-out keyboard so it's trying to find the RSS feed for pocket now it seems to have found it so I'm going to click Subscribe and now i will have the pocket now RSS feed upon my home screen and I can tap here and swipe through all of the recent RSS feeds from today so kind of a cool way to quickly check on news and see what's going on so I'm going to delete that and beyond that you get the other standard standard Android widgets some of these I've added like battery widget digital clock so on and so forth nothing special in the pulldown notification it's not like the galaxy s where you can quickly toggle Wi-Fi or Bluetooth from up here but you get the sort of white style the white skin some Android phones have a black or dark gray skin to go with their entire skin ok so let's talk now about some of the built-in programs then we're going to compare launching programs i'm using the browser with the droid x to see if froyo has made a difference so let's go into the application tray and oddly even though I've turned off animations I still get an anime in and out of the application train just kind of annoying it slows down the device a little bit so the droid 2 comes with a blockbuster application of course you have to pay for that it comes with city ID a lot of these apps you can get in the android marketplace but verizon obviously has some deals with these these companies like amazon mp3 and down here with google search gallery which probably doesn't have any pictures in it well maybe one can open this picture this is actually a video that i took earlier and we'll go over you to play back in in a couple of minutes we'll compare that to the droid x and see which play back a smoother so that is a big gallery it has DLNA support so you can play multimedia from your joy to on through any other DLNA supported device kindle application is included although of course that's an android market application quickoffice is included so you can view and edit Microsoft Office documents always nice to have and then you get the other standard stuff here that is typical for an android 2.2 device and of course in settings we have the froyo adjusted settings so now display and sound are two different elements not too big of a deal but I'm just a nice way to separate the two okay so here now we have the droid x right next to the droid two and we're going to do some speed tests I've tried to set up the home screens as similarly as possible so if I swipe to the left you're getting basically the same thing here let's see how fast things happen faster on the droid to their simple operation scroll to the left they basically seem the same have the same amount of smoothness maybe the droid 2 is a little bit smoother than the droid x in this situation let's see how long it takes to launch the application tray okay was faster on the droid two so far so good the droid 2 is definitely proving to be a little bit faster let's open up settings okay droid 2 is faster and opening up settings let's open up the browser joy to a slightly faster in that case also so let's go to pocket now that over the same Wi-Fi network and let's see if the droid to froyo browser is indeed faster now should tell you that I plugins enabled which means that it's going to show Flash content whereas the droid x is not going to so that actually gives you the droid x an advantage but out of the box the droid two as plugins enabled so I'm trying to replicate that out of box experience so let's see which is faster so far the droid 2 is smoking the droid x actually it looks like the droid x is droid x 1 very interesting we left the droid to finish and we're actually going to turn off plugins in a minute just want to move around the page so you kind of get an idea for how smooth they do that ok so let's pinch and zoom seems a little bit smoother on the droid x actually and again I think that's because the droid 2 is showing Flash content so real quick i'm going to disable the plugins the flash content so that it's more of an even playing field here ok and now let's go to engadget.com see which gets there faster now with plugins disabled got that up there okay and even with the delay the droid two still won by it looks like five seconds so far we're going to get to 10 seconds now so I'll just stop it from loading so the droid 2 is definitely faster let's move around on the page here on the joy to accidentally clicked on a link and we're going to click on a permalink at the same time and see which gets there faster so but a double tap to zoom in double tap to zoom in and click these at the same time okay then they're off and by the way neither device has any tabs open which could slow down performance so let's see which works fastest and the droid x keeps on going we're gonna have to stop it here let's go to the sidebar here and tap on something we'll try one more speed test I should mention that the droid x on the droid to have similar hardware inside they both have a 1 gigahertz texas instruments omap processor they both have 512 megabytes of RAM the real big difference here is of course the operating system version so let's see which gets fastest to this page okay the droid 2 1 living up to its claim to be faster than android 2.1 in fact applications loaded faster the application tray open up quicker let's just test screen rotation speed just to see if there's a difference there okay exactly the same they're exactly the same so the joy to is faster there are no big difference in terms of screen rotation speed and just for good measure let's jump into YouTube try to do it at the exact same time so you can get a sense for how smooth video playback is compared to these two by two devices and how fast YouTube actually opens lots of fingerprints on the screen there so let's say the joy to was about a half a second ahead so we're going to tap on the first video see which buffer is the first take it from there well that was unfair because the droid two didn't pick up that press go back and we'll do this one ok so the droid two died in a crafter and let's just watch video playback for just a minute sewage cribs and so the colors are more saturated here on the joy to and the contrast is also better but of course you get a bigger screen on the droid x so this concludes the software review of the motorola droid 2 for those of you that have the original droid which had a very much stock Android installation you may be a little bit disappointed with the customizations made to the droid two but personally I think it's a good thing because you've got to get a lot of extra widgets you get a little bit of customization that makes your android phone feel different than other android phones out there and of course we found out that with android 2.2 the droid 2 is significantly faster than the droid x which has android 2.1 running very similar hardware programs open faster web pages render quick more quickly and it's smoother japan and scroll around on a web page so the droid 2 gets high marks in the software Department be sure to check pocket now calm for the four of you or we'll talk about photo quality camera quality battery life and more about performance please thumbs up this video if you liked it and thanks for watching that's it for now