Gadgetory

what's up everyone John Rhett enger' from TechnoBuffalo here with a full review for you of the first dual core LTE device on the market this is the Droid Bionic for Verizon Wireless we first saw this guy debuted at CES in early 2011 finally have its release I've had it in my hot little data loving hands for the better part of three and a half weeks so I spent a lot of time with it let's go ahead dig in and see if it's been worth the wait alright so before I jump into all kinds of other goodness about the phone let's talk about call quality it's not gonna make good phone calls for you there's not much of a point behind having this as with most Verizon devices I've tested call quality was outstanding this handled the LTE to 3G transition better than any of the other 4G LTE devices I've tested including the charge and the Thunderbolt so no problems at all when it comes to voice quality Motorola has really done a nice job with this phone and by xx call test I had zero drop calls including areas where I generally get dropped called fourth Verizon Wireless so what maintain a pretty strong 4G signal of about two bars most places that I went I did travel out of the 4G area to see how it worked I use this phone as my daily driver for three odd weeks on it really worked well and I was very happy with the phone's performance so no worries there speakerphone is pretty average and loud enough if your lion speaker phone in your car though I are definitely going to want to invest in a Bluetooth headset or a Bluetooth speaker all right so enough of that let's go ahead and start with the hardware there's a lot of stuff to talk about the hardware pack into this guy so let's go ahead and get started with the design and it will run through all the specs guests are that familiar shape we've been seeing with a lot of Motorola's phones the Droid X and the Droid X 2 so this teardrop fat in the top skinny down below or reversed type setup so on the thickest point it's thirteen point three millimeters on the thinnest it's eleven point three millimeters the screen itself is very similar to the screen that we saw on the Droid X 2 q HD 4.3 inches that's going to be a resolution of 540 by 960 and of course that's always measured diagonal capacitive touchscreen all the stuff you would expect 4G LTE speeds a a little bit over a Giga Ram actually on the back we've got living on the hump we have 8 megapixel camera with LED flash that can shoot 1080p video I will talk about the video quality in just a moment as well it's got a VGA a front-facing camera and that dual-core processor the Texas Instruments built one with one gigahertz on each core interestingly Motorola went away from the Tegra 2 they've used in previous dual-core devices for a Texas Instruments processor in this one alright so let's go ahead and see what else we're gonna have around the phone on the left-hand side sphere charging ports gonna live HDMI out not gonna go over that it's HDMI out it's a mini HDMI on top of the device on the left hand side is where your power and lock button is going to be I prefer it on the right but that's just a taste thing 3.5 millimeter jack on the right volume rocker up and down very well pronounced easy to use speaker on the top you've got some indicators here as well for proximity sensors there's the VGA camera on the front and the back is sort of dubbed in the soft touch finish finish it's got a pretty good feel in the hand actually underneath this cover is a monumentally giant 1700 milliamp hour battery that's a 10% increase over the charge and a 15% increase over the funderbolt one of my big knocks on LTE phones and battery life has been atrocious I'm very heavy on my phones when it comes a male got two accounts that's searching for messages almost all the time even when I have pushed services on here maybe about two hours of phone calls some YouTube viewing on here and a lot of web browsing and I was able to get through a full day of battery life just barely but I was able to get through a full day so chances are if you're less of a power user than me you're not gonna have any trouble getting through a full day with the Droid Bionic so hats off to Motorola for that one alright so let's go and talk about performance that was really the big thing and I wanted to know about this phone is how is it sucker going to perform well my quadrant score was two thousand one hundred and forty and that's what the stock rom here so it's a pretty decent performance overall I think certainly if you decide you want to get in there and tinker you could probably eat gout some better scores but 21:40 was very very nice and certainly quadrants not the only benchmarking test you can do but is constant in all my android tests I always use quadrants so you can check out other scores there as well this phone is blazing fast just very very very quick I'm not connected to any sort of Wi-Fi here but it's quick from app loads its quick for web browsing is quick for everything pinch-to-zoom no lag at all even when I'm doing sites that a flash on I don't notice any service slow down this thing is extremely capable and really able to bring in just some tremendous speeds in performance even with applications open it's got plenty of RAM you can use 16 gigs of built-in storage expandable microSD about half that's gonna be available for your applications the other half is you know system stuff that gets taken up you can see how quick a simple page load was here just very very very fast let's go and check out some of the applications and see how the speed is on here again even with a lot of apps open I really had no issue at all opening things open some stuff I've never opened before about NSL mobile something that wasn't running in the background launched pretty quick will agree and now we are into NFL mobile I not once had to manage my memory usage on this phone at all and that was during three weeks of testing I didn't have to closed any applications this thing just worked smoothly it was nice to not have to worry about that for a change so if you forget to close applications oftentimes some of the bugs that happen with Android phones in general are due to quitting applications so things you might be using by third parties that close application and sometimes that close things that are important to the phone that can cause glitches which are really no fault of the operating system or the hardware that actually user based so no need to worry about that here at all go ahead and run back and show you some more speeds here so talking about some download speeds I'll go ahead and show you what my speedtest.net speeds are if I can find it here very fast go ahead and show you results I was pulling down about you can see here if the two most recent ones 4.2 down and 5.5 7 up was the most recent test generally my speeds were about three down and about three up so really quick here most impressive I think is the up speeds if you need to use your phone or using mobile hotspot capabilities to say upload a video there you be able to do that five megabits per second up is faster than most average people's home connections yours might be crazy faster but for most people it's not going to be the case so this thing really is an absolute speed demon all right let's talk a bit about the software here you're looking at a skinned version of gingerbread it's got motoblur on it kind of but you're not calling it motoblur anymore and because you're not calling it motoblur anymore it's actually a usable version of motoblur so yay for that here's some tweaks let's go ahead look at applications you can see you're right down below hopefully it's a horizontal scrolling and it moves as you go a little bit of a 3d esque effect this is not a 3d screen just sort of emulates 3d on here you can see what that kind of looks like as you go through a lot of built-in applications here so you'll need some verizon add-ons VZ Navigator V CAST videos all that V stuff but some of the nice things you're gonna get things like quick office can go ahead and create and edit all of your word stuff got to go ahead and register but that's really a nice addition one of the things I also like to is this most call to widget if you go ahead and pull it down you get a whole bunch of stuff you can add their different contacts you want to call it which is a really nice feature so that I didn't have to add a whole screen icons people that I call I could just add this and be able to pull it down and save a lot of screen real estate oh this might be a personal thing but I found myself going like this quite a bit similar to what you do with HTC Sense or a touch wiz lets you do that to go ahead and hit home you can jump around and see the home screen and see what stuff look like and go to the one you want but I can't find myself want to do that didn't work though so if you're familiar with HTC devices you don't want to forget you spend a little bit I wish that the pull down here also had notifications across the top and things that will let me change turn by off turn four G off and those kind of toggle switches but alas it does not one of the nice things about Andrew - if you don't like the way this looks you can download a brand new launcher and you know be off to go you know launch your pros one of those ones that are really good and very easy to use let's take about some of the widgets that's gonna be available on here as well so I'll go ahead and open this up take a look at widgets and some are standard Android some are motorola going let you see what it is citrix for some remote office stuff go through and scroll through all them and see what they are so there are little widgets like Wi-Fi toggle that you can add but I like I got used to having them up here so in there tweak stuff you can do to give you those options as well so let's run through the hardware again just very quickly it's pretty nice thin device able to fit in my pocket without any sort of worry the screen here was very decent if I go and take a look at some colors some wallpapers for example you can see if the screen looks like all those stumps always gets lost in translation a little bit when you are wallpapers there we go go to wallpapers when you're filming it I had a little bit of trouble in direct sunlight images were tough to see but that's to be expected text was very crisp images came across very clear and bright blacks from very black colors were very colorful text I'll go ahead and jump back to the website here we'll load an article iPhone 5 live blog for example and this is over just a 4G connection see there's a ton of stuff floating there's Flash content pulling in here no speed decrease at all text was very good really crisp Biden getting sort of pixelation on this device so if you're looking for one of the fastest possibly one of the most spectro mount there I'd say this and the galaxy s2 would be the ones that are definitely top of the list this is a great phone and this is when the Android phones that can wholeheartedly recommend it doesn't make any compromises you don't sacrifice battery life to get the faster data speeds you're on sacrificing performance to get the size this phone really has everything and is well worth a dollar the dollars that it costs and suddenly sits at least right now at the very top of Verizon's lineup I give this throne a very very solid to thumbs up recommendation five out of five this is definitely one of the best phones on the market when I could certainly use as my daily driver I mentioned towards the earlier part of the video to talk about the cameras camera quality was about average about you'd expect from a camera phone nothing to write home about certainly not gonna become I always make this bad joke in so atoms with your camera phone but it does work decently on it will shoot HD video so if you're out in the valley your friends are doing something funny this will work but definitely don't leave your standard point-and-shoot camera at home hope you guys enjoyed this full review the Motorola Droid Bionic I'm John Rhett enger' from TechnoBuffalo be sure to check us out for all of your tech news and I will see you in the next video buh-bye