Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe with pocket now calm and today we're going to talk about the motorola droid bionic show you a little bit about how it performs and some of the software that comes with let's go take a look alright so since the major selling point behind this phone is well in addition to its large gorgeous screen is also its dual core processor let's jump right into performance and see how it performs in some of the benchmarks a couple things I want to show you first let's do linpack here's what it ran before which took about 3.9 seconds and it gave us 43.2 26 mega flops when running in multi-threaded we'll go ahead and run that really fast because it only takes a few seconds to run it you can see right there again mega flux 42.8 a 5 if we run that in a single thread it's going to take a little bit longer theoretically about twice as long but we still get a really really good score even though we have a inaccurate result which happens occasionally when we're running this particular benchmark running it again you can see that we've got our precision back so overall very very fast device let's jump over to quadrant and since quadrant takes a little while to run I'm also going to jump into telling you about what benchmark things are and do because there's a little bit of a debate going on out there about them so a benchmark is a high watermark it is essentially how fast is this device perform a predetermined set of tests and you can see some of the graphics tests going through right now compared to another device running the same tests now the difference there is the other device has a different set of hardware than this device so since the tests are all the same the theory follows that the benchmarking results will simply show let me pause from and you see right in here we've got some graphic anomalies on this little planet just point that out in the benchmark but the benchmarking will then essentially show the speed differences between the two devices being compared now that doesn't play out entirely true fact right here you can see my benchmark score is about 2,500 that's about the same that I get with my t-mobile g2 overclocked to 1.5 gigahertz which is a single core by the way you think so what we've got with benchmarking is a device that doesn't perform nearly as well as it should now when I say should I mean that's an implication that this device should be a lot faster not to say it's not this device is ridiculously fast but in the Mensch marking I'd expect to see this at least into the 3000's which of course is the drawback of benchmarks this benchmarking utility in fact most of them don't take full advantage of the hardware that comes out the brand new stuff so in this case it would be the the dual core processor let me show you something else that it doesn't take advantage of and it's really kind of funny smart bench 2011 is another one of the benchmark utilities that we use takes a minute to load up and on this device I get an ad and it's almost always a dating ad I don't know why smart bench has so many dating ads on it but I don't have any way to start the test if I come down here that's going to take me over to the market for that ad I tap around sometimes I can get it to run every time I've been able to get this to run just by kind of randomly tapping and trying to get it to run it'll run but then I can never get the results back so we're going to have to give this one it did not finish because it didn't finish the benchmark but that's because of the screen resolution that this is a very large nice screen for the specifics make sure you head over to pocketnow.com so you can see the stats on just exactly how big this screen is and we'll go from there alright so let's run through a browser test I've got pocketnow.com queued up to run on each one of these three devices will hit Go Go and go at the same time as close as we can there and the motorola droid bionic will set up really quickly t-mobile g2 shortly after unfortunately on the HTC I think I did a Google search instead of doing an actual run so we'll go ahead and open that up over here so one of the things that the Wildfire s is a little but interesting about but overall you can see how quickly they came up this is over 80 to 11 and Wi-Fi and it's just really really fast let's go ahead and see how fast it loads the desktop version try and start these two at the same time and the middle one will start after now the desktop version of our site is a lot larger a lot heavier than the mobile version and well I think you know why overall though you can see just how much faster you're faster phones on this side run compared to the Wildfire s we're all almost entirely complete over here with the the Bionic the g2 is coming in really closely it's both sides are functional we've got flash that's pre-loading and running smoothly and we're still kind of trying to get there over with the Wildfire s now as you can see over here i'm on a 3g network connection and i'm also on Wi-Fi with almost full bars let's go ahead and run a speed test against that Wi-Fi just so you can see how fast it runs the first thing that I noticed about running speedtest.net by koukla is just how fast it runs on this device starting it up running it I the whole thing animations everything is a lot smoother even than my overclocked g2 it's ridiculously fast the ping times over my Wi-Fi here 18 milliseconds that's really really low 15.7 to megabit per second down 4.09 megabit per second up just ridiculously fast let me go ahead and toggle the Wi-Fi off we're going to try that again over 3g now this is an LTE device I'm not under an LTE umbrella so I'm just going to have to tell you what those speeds are but we'll run the same test again under 3g just so you can get a feel about how fast it is over a traditional 3g network alright I've turned off the Wi-Fi we're going to restart the test under verizon 3g testing the ping first the ping is how fast you ask for something before you get a reply back here you can see we're at 181 milliseconds most wireless carriers that I've have been right around there anything below 300 is usually acceptable anything above that you're getting a little bit slow t-mobile has been a bit faster than that 181 milliseconds they're usually in the double digits and usually the low double digits download speed we can see there we've got a point for two megabit per second upload it looks like it's going to be a little bit less than one megabit per second that's not that great but it's not common for what I usually see I'm going to run the test here again for you just so we can get a good baseline normally I'm running right around 11.2 megabit per second down and that up speed is this pretty representative of what i normally get we'll run that one more time just so you can see the results of two tests run back-to-back so here are the results of that next test and they're not all that indicative of what I was hoping to show you we've got point 39 megabit per second up and point 84 megabit per second down while I'm describing my experience with a 4g LTE will let that run again normally you'll see your download speeds about double sometimes not quite double your upload speeds and that's just the asynchronous nature of internet connections that we normally have these days luckily I'm about 20-30 minutes away from a 4G LTE bubble and I've never been able to get full bars but I've always had two or three out of four so it hasn't been too bad the test that I've run over there on those locations have been in line with what I'd expect 4G to be it's about three to five megabit per second down about one and a half bag a bit per second up and that's in line with the t-mobile hspa+ in the same areas I was expecting LTE to be ridiculously fast speed of lightning all kinds bells and whistles unfortunately that hasn't been my experience but it may be closer to that where you live but definitely 4G LTE is amazing now one thing I want to mention 3g is over cdma now the cdma network and the GSM networks are very different verizon has done an awful lot with their cdma network they're kind of abandoning that for LTE in my opinion but there is an inherent little caveat that you may want to take into consideration with 3g or even to g / cdma and that is when i'm driving down the road i normally pick out my favorite navigation app waze big shout out to you guys there which now has advertisements but i'm usually driving down the road with this up so that i can see what the traffic is where I'm where I'm headed where I'm going and I can also report stuff as I see it accidents cops whatever it may be this uses a data connection to pull that data down into bring the maps into place and to show me those those alerts like you were just seeing on the screen when i get a phone call which I do quite often in the car I have that over Bluetooth because you might bluetooth is on and I have my car kit set up so that I can just take those calls right there in the car no headset needed and I go ahead and make those calls and driving down the road of course being safe but while I'm on the call I don't have data coming in as long as I'm on 3g LTE is different but when i want 3g and i'm on a call I don't have any data now that is kind of a disconnect that has has caused some hangs and some issues with various apps when i go back to them after getting off the phone call because now it's got to reconnect to the data network and make that work so just a little bit of an inconvenience there nothing major but it is something to mention about the phone next let's get into the apps that come with this now first of all you're going to notice this is not the stock Android experience this is kind of a motoblur kind of a droid kind of a bionic thing it's it's fresh its new and it's subtle I don't particularly like custom launchers that's just me I prefer raw core pure Android I think that's what google intended and I think that any device manufacturer who tries to add to that is taking away from the experience away from the brand that is Android and taking away well speed because it's stuff on top of the the stock interface that we're all used to so let's spend a little bit of time looking at this interface for those of you who haven't seen it if you've got a droid you're probably familiar with a lot of the stuff that i'm going to show you but for your friends who may not know let me show you first of all we've got this really nice i'm already at the end over there so let's scroll this way if you notice here we've got this cool layered effect i've got a live wallpaper in the background that had some 3d but as you move you'll notice I've got a nice Sheen across my widgets and across my icons a nice reflective animation that just adds a little bit of polish as I scroll the icons down here will kind of bunch up together and you've got kind of an unfolding kind of a stacking on top of each other animation to how you're changing pages on here now this is a five page layout some others like mine have seven some have 3some have one whatever you need to use there you go this is has five and it's been plenty for me but it feels really nice let's go ahead and check out some other things if I pull down the notification tray you can see I've got a very nice gradient more translucent to be at the bottom then at the top I don't have any of the HTC hot tasks if you will running up in the top and it's a little bit unfortunate I'd like to be able to toggle some of my my radios my Wi-Fi my airplane mode and whatnot up here or even have a recent applications up here like some of the HTC Sense devices do or some of the cyanogen mods do but I don't and it really that hasn't been a problem it's been just one of those things that I kind of kind of miss a little bit now what you're not seeing here is a series of alerts or notifications I have none at this time so I can't really show you that but I'll get you a view of that here in just a minute let's go ahead and fire up the the dialer the dialer is kind of a different look on it's got nice big buttons it feels very much in theme with what we have in the other devices and really the theme that's across this device it's just a nice consistent UI overlay let's jump into the launcher now i have installed some of my own apps on here and i'll just brief over what the apps are that come with the device just so you can kind of tell them apart but let's look at this first you'll notice we've got some little drop down shadows at the bottom just to give kind of a 3d effect this is a horizontal scroll or an a a vertical scroller like we are accustomed to and you can kind of see there the cube like 3d effect when we change pages go ahead and exit out of that if we can alright so let's go back let's touch on on what we have kind of stock that comes with the device alarm and timer obviously amazon kindle is an app that comes pre-installed the blockbuster app as well browser I don't like the icon for browser although it looks just like a browser it's just kind of a disconnect we're used to a globe calendar is pretty much the stock Android calendar there's calculated rather calendar you can start to see some of the some of the more subtle effects from droid let me get you over to a just a rock calendar look if we look up here you can see I've got this little plus sign and a little bit of information now this is where you start to see some of that droid bionic theming come into play when you have notifications they look like this whether that's a download whether that's an email a text message you've got what it is and then a little dismiss button over on the side well this obviously is an Add button but it looks very similar it's it's subtle it's simple its elegant and I'm really impressed with it they've done a very good job at incorporating that through the entire OS even over here you can see I've got my whatever it is up on the top and then I nice icon over the side an action icon in more or less the same look and feel even when I come in here to my recent applications it looks just like what you'd expect it to look like it's not a different UI metaphor so kind of kind of nice there it's just a different view of your apps really it's not a little pop-up block like it is on some of the Android devices that come with stock Android back to the apps that come with this camcorder and camera are separate separate icons essentially the same app does take a little bit of time to load but this camcorder will do 1080p HD video and it does so amazingly we've got a sample video over at pocketnow.com you can go and look at we'll have a link to that in the final review for this phone as well so you can see what it looks like and over all the comments have been remarkably positive so it's not just a bias on my part your peers are thinking that this camcorder is quite amazing the camera can do either 8 megapixel or 6 megapixel widescreen I've got some 8 megapixel live images raw images that will have up in the final review as well so you can see how that looks both on macro and micro and well all kinds of different shots that I could pull out for you Citrix is kind of cool Citrix is essentially lets you connect to other computers this is a remote desktop client and that lets you work from your phone that really comes into play when you've got some accessories and when you're on an LTE network the accessories include the atrix style laptop dock if you will it gives you a keyboard and that monitor and whatnot and unless you use your phone as a laptop you also have a dock that you can acquire that lets you do the same thing to to a monitor keyboard mouse and whatnot so very cool their city ID is an app that I like it's kind of an afterthought but I really like this when you get a phone call and don't know who it's from this will look up their caller ID and tell you what city and state they're calling from or where that phone number is registered in so really nice if you don't have caller ID for them a name caller ID be and just a phone number it can help you know well oh that's my friends from Mesa Arizona okay great contacts our contacts I've got a whole ton of them but you've got this whole interface again that's the same across all of the customizations that Motorola has made so very nice looking there let's keep going through here knife it back one too many times device setup I'll show you that in just a minute that's really the walkthrough of how you get everything set up on the device it's a very smooth and fluid process I like it quite a bit DLNA it lets you connect to and serve as a DLNA a digital living network alliance I believe is what that stands for server or client it lets you share photos and supported videos across various and devices on your network that could be a picture frame that could be a TV that could be a computer in my case it's a windows media center unfortunately the format in which the videos are recorded for my windows media center are not playable back here on the on the phone but I kind of expected that it's a proprietary format my home videos stuff that i have in just regular formats play just fine over my Wi-Fi to the phone it's really kind of cool with a little bit of lag to show the libraries but that's kind of understandable downloads we all know what that is email is their implementation of email and I'll show you just really quick here same look and feel with how many new items you have a really really nice implementation of the stock email client that comes with the with most devices to be able to get non gmail emails Facebook app it didn't come with but it comes with a Facebook connector files is a file browser lets you look into your file system and getting stuff does it come stock with a lot of devices it does come stock with this photo gallery gmail we know what those are at Google search we know what that is gotomeeting is essentially a meeting client lets you share at least the desktop version once you share your desktop and also audio and video and whatnot i believe this version that does just the screenshots and that's just fine with me guided tours is a walk through it helps you figure out what you can do with your device a very nice help center is kind of a text-only version of that I am is a unified instant messenger that lets you do yahoo lets you do aim it lets you do msn doesn't let you do google talk but we have google talk for that so very nice they're a little gratuitous plug for my appt Joe the web guy available in the market latitude does not come with the other device need to just show the web guy by the way let's golf too this is an amazing game it's awesome I love it it it only comes with a few levels out of the out of the box wants you to buy the full thing but the full thing is gorgeous it's essentially a golfing game very nice very well implemented as good as the the desktop versions and then some just all kinds of amazing the market obviously it comes with and that's where you get all of your stuff from it comes right out of the box with the new version of the market which I don't really like but that's what we have that's what it does messaging is pretty much email it's your other messaging the the email over here is for corporate email whereas this is for other stuff now most carriers are going away from using that built in android hotspot functionality with their own essentially so they can charge you more money and I don't necessarily blame them for that although I do think it's unfortunate here is verizon's and essentially it just lets you turn on and off your mobile hotspot manage your devices and tell it when to turn off so very very basic it does what it's supposed to do but it is an extra charge that you do have to sign up for and the first time that you run that it's going to walk you through the setup process to add that service to your monthly account moto print very cool you want to be able to print from your device that's how you do it the unfortunate thing is there are not a lot of devices that are and when I say devices I mean network or internet connected devices that are on the compatible list so if you want to be able to print chances are you've got to install a third-party app or in this case the corresponding client app to put it on a computer that has a printer connected to it that is connected to the internet so you can print through that which means you have to download install and maintain software on your desktop computer your desktop computer has to be on and it has to be connected to the internet for it to work so the utility right now is a little bit lower than what I'd like it to be but very very cool for thought and that's going to pick up and become a lot more important especially as you can use this as a desktop computer with the right accessories music is your music app my accounts basically jumps you right into the account screen that lets you go in and add a Facebook and Twitter any number of those accounts there's a whole bunch of them that they support lots and lots of cool stuff my verizon mobile is your verizon account yeah lets you get in and do tools and all kinds of cool stuff navigation and Netflix all very very explanatory not on the device to begin with Netflix maybe but I installed that almost right away so I don't know if it actually came on the device or not if not go out to the market and you can download install it news is a simple news aggregator I'll show you what the widget to that looks like and it fell mobile I think we all know what that is Pandora places did not come on the device a quick office did there is an upgrade to this they do want you to pay for it but I can still use it to view all of my microsoft office and other office formatted documents the phone does come with slacker radio which is really cool also comes with this social location and social networking app which just let you share your location and your social network status with your various different social networks whether that's Facebook or Twitter or any of the other so you saw in the accounts I've installed sound how speed tests and stop watching timer and microsoft tag comes with task manager tasks text messaging all of these V castings and I didn't get into video serve voice command which i think is redundant with voice search does come with voicemail and verizon navigator which is Google Maps or ways but you have to pay for it by use or by week or by month all kinds of cool stuff and of course we've got youtube and zumocast as well zumo cast being a service by motorola that again you've got to have software running on your desktop computer to be able to get any utility out of it so that is pretty much what comes with the the device here the widgets that I was going to tell you about will wrap up on those this is a the ways widget up here we have your gallery widget tap on that and you can then open it up you can go into your camera roll your library your friends DLNA servers and whatnot very cool looking very nice very fluid it looks really good over here in landscape as well changing the layout to fit better on the screen so really really nice there let's go back home I've got just one or two more that I want to show you the calendar here is scrollable now in Android you usually in stock Android you usually have to get a custom launcher and you have to get a custom widget to be able to do this this is built in way to go Motorola it's beautiful it's great i love it same thing over here with the my data usage this is usually something you have to get from the market and it's usually not that accurate in this case very good very nice very accurate here's the news widget same interface that you used to you can see all of your news articles we go back here we've got our social widget where you can see your Twitter and Facebook feeds and set your status as well very nice very fluid it's just dumb only it's supposed to be done it's beautiful one last widget to show you is your favorite contacts widget and here you can see I've got four of my favorite contacts including my mom if I drag down you can see a cool little animation where it looks like it's pulling the stack down and if I release it it's going to pull up all of my favorite contacts right there if I reverse that it's going to put them all back very nice very animated just to show you how nice and quick and fluid that is there you go you can also see in here a carryover from the same subtle UI tweaks with that the header bar and the common used icon stuff so very very nice overall Motorola you did a fabulous job with the verizon droid bionic now let's get to the bad news and will end on that number one you can see my battery right here battery life is going to last you about half a day with moderate to heavy use you're going to want to make sure that you have this thing plugged in when you wake up in the morning plugged in as soon as you get in the car if you're going to be doing GPS plugged in when you're at work just sitting there and keep this as full as you can next recently we showed a little video on pocket now about wall warts wall warts being those things that you plug into the wall to charge up your devices and whatnot this comes with one it does really good one of my alternatives was to use a powered USB hub to to kind of split that power out amongst multiple devices and you can get rid of all of those wall warts except for the one for the USB hub this does not charge over that and it took me days to figure that out you know why was it not charging it was maintaining but it wasn't charging so I'd get up in the morning and i had the same materie life that i had the night before and it didn't work had to go back to the wall wart the USB power outlet that I showed you in that video as well worked just fine with fabulously well for it just the other one does not so keep keep that in mind if you're running into power problems make sure you are using a wall wart or a dedicated socket for it not sharing it and be a lot happier next the battery takes a long time to charge even when plugged into its long board it can charge in charge in charge in charge for hours and hours and hours it's a 1700 plus milliamp battery so it's understandable that's a huge amount to to fill up with electricity but it takes a long time don't expect just a quick charge and you're done like on some of the other devices this phone takes a lot of juice it takes a while to charge it up there is an inductive charging sleeve that you can get they see if I can find that in the accessories book really fast right there they call it the wireless charging battery cover so you can get that and just set your phone down on a charging pad sold separately and it'll just charge up inductively that might be your best solution get this thing get a pad for work a pad for home and just set it down on there so you don't have to worry about it one other thing the little powered USB port right down there is upside down from every other one that I've ever seen so when you're plugging in make sure you have that in the right orientation which is kind of hard to do when you're coming home and it's late and you don't want to turn the lights on and yeah it's just kind of difficult to get that orientation right but keep that in mind that other one by the way is my hdmi port and I've just turned down Pandora while we were here little matchbox 20 for us see how fluid that is I love it love it love it so that's the next thing now last and we'll talk about this a little bit more that's your headphone jack got it it's a headset more than anything I still didn't get pandora off how about that matchbox 20 there we go now when listening to music through the speaker the speaker is down here it's on the back which is kind of a different place from where they usually are up here on the top that's fine but when you kept it to amplify the speaker you got to do the bottom of the phone at the top of the phone little tip for you there that sound is great I love it it's wonderful as soon as you plug in a headset to the top especially with Netflix you're going to give hisses you're going to get pop so you're going to get a high-pitched whine and it's something where you're not going to think that it's the phone in fact I thought it was the netflix tough i'm going through the Star Trek Voyager series right now and there were a lot of hisses whines and pops that were driving my wife and I nuts when we were listening to this over over the ear bud it's not the audio source it's actually inside the device now I don't know what's been done recently I've been trying to get to the bottom of it and that's kind of why this review has taken a little bit longer to get out this is not uncommon other people are getting this as well it seems to be across the board not limited to a specific set of phones and hopefully there's going to be some kind of an update that comes out to it but we haven't found anything yet having been said without having seen any updated also the phone come through and I've been checking they seem to be gone away whether that means that I've just got used to them or they're really gone because of something else I don't know but it's been quite a while since I've noticed those pops in that high-pitched whine the quieter electromagnetically speaking your environment is the better it seems that that is so that might be indicative of a poorly shielded port or connection back there on the back which I hope not because that would be a hardware problem rather than a firmware software problem that could be fixed with an update or a patch but like I said in the last few days and it's only been the last few days that I've been using it that's gone away I haven't noticed it or it's just not there at all so make sure you head over to pocketnow.com to see the full review of this wonderful awesome device I am going to be so sad to send this back to verizon even though i'm not really a verizon guy i'm not really a motorola guy this is by far the most awesome phone i have ever had the opportunity to use and even with the battery even with the the slowness to charge even with those audio pups and whatnot you are not going to be disappointed at all if you go out and grab this as your preferred device I know I wasn't it's an amazing device and if I were on verizon this would be the phone that I would be carrying around on a daily basis so that is the really extended software review showing off not only benchmarks for speed but also the processor as well the built-in apps as well as some of the others that we've done and a few little caveats that we've caught in our testing so an awful lot that we covered in this video we've got a write-up about the device that's coming to pocketnow.com over the next couple days make sure you read the full review and get our final decision on this phone I think I've kind of hinted to you at what the rating is going to be already but make sure you get the full write-up if you want to make sure that you're up to date on the newest latest and greatest phones make sure you subscribe to our video channel so you get those updates as they come out subscribing of course is free it's all through YouTube head over to pocket now calm you can also subscribe to our RSS feed which also is free so you can know about new articles as soon as they come out and of course if you like seeing really really detailed videos like this make sure you give the video a thumbs up and if you have questions or comments that you would like to share specifically about that audio issue or the battery make sure you do those down in the comments down below for pocket now showing off amazing motorola droid bionic i'm joe levi