Gadgetory

what's up everyone John Breton Gherkin TechnoBuffalo here at the full review of the Motorola Droid 2 a sequel to the phone that really started the Android craze on Verizon let's see if it lives up to its name so before we talk about keyboard screen and specs let's talk about the call quality of the device since it is a phone doesn't make good phone calls no matter what else it does it's not gonna be much use to you and typical two varieties lineup of phones called quad is excellent I experienced no white noise on my end the caller experience no white noise on their end wasn't any popping in xx call test a while driving for half of those I experienced zero drop calls other reviewing here seems to be on par with average devices generally I can pull in about two or three Barnes EVDO Rev a in certain areas and this pulled in almost exactly that no more than no less so it's got an average radio if you should get pretty decent signal strength if you're in verizon network alright so let's go ahead and talk about specs this guy is being run by a one gigahertz TI OMAP processor it's got a 3.7 inch of course the positive touch screen at the resolution of 480 by a 54 so pretty high resolution and the display supports up to 16 million colors it's got bluetooth 2.1 it comes with eight gigabytes installed on the phone sort of soldered in there as well as an eight gigabyte microSD card and does come with Android 2.2 that's Froyo right out of box no need to wait or worry for an upgrade of course it's got Wi-Fi Bluetooth GPS rest of stuff that you would expect alright so let's talk a little bit about the design care about the design of the jury to that at least referencing the Droid 1 let's go ahead and bring that guy in here just for a minute if you can remember my initial review of the Droid I was a big fan of it Android when it was first launched in the joy particular when it came to Verizon I hadn't achieved that much success that had been sort of a fringe operating system loaned it to one carrier on the US and Verizon really embraced OS and the Droid was a first offering it was a huge success I loved away the phone work I loved the way it felt one of the things that I really didn't like about the initial droid was the slide-out QWERTY keyboard it had a very very very large deep at here which took away a lot of the key space the keys were separated but it was not a very easy typing experience definitely one of the worst physical QWERTY keyboards that I've ever used so now let's talk about the Droid 2 they fixed that keyboard issue so you don't have that d-pad there anymore that almost looked like a fingerprint scanner replace it with just 4-way navigation arrows and they got rid of the key separation so each key looked different and actually felt different it's almost cut differently now we've got sort of a single membrane on top of all the keys you can see that a little bit raised makes for not much improved typing experience that actually was very disappointed I've tested a lot of full QWERTY phones this is probably one of the worst keyboards that I've ever used so if you're thinking about picking up the phone because you wanted a corded keyboard I definitely recommend going to try it in a Verizon stores you may be disappointed with how it performs that being said Motorola does have one of the best sort of on-screen keyboard augmentations to the sake Android one so you can rely very easily on the on-screen keyboard although if you're picking up a Droid 2 did on the slide-out is really a nice feature so you're really missing out on one of the primary selling points the Droid 2 another sort of small gripe is that the keyboards not spring-loaded meeting when you slide it out doesn't sort of launch I have to push it all the way a very small complaint something that I missed and that I've seen on other slide-out QWERTY devices the differences again between the Droid 1 and the Droid 2 you're from a physical standpoint this big pronounced chain which where the antenna resided it's a little bit less pronounced that you can still see it a little bit there it's more of sort of an evolutionary little streamlined design the new Droid 2 is running Motorola's redesigned UI still sort of being called motoblur so get a little bit different button to write you've got that sort of four square grid which will just pulled up a menu button for me places the traditional menu button found on Greg Android devices and that's really it from an aesthetic standpoint of course you've gotten more of a chrome feel or chrome look as opposed to the black from the past so this is running a 1 gigahertz TI on that processor and we started heard that 1 gigahertz ember quite a bit Ryan's got a few of them for instance these samsung fascinate running Samsung's hummingbird chip you've got the droid incredible running a 1 gigahertz Snapdragon processor sort of stack all through processors up the ti processor running in the droid 2 the Snapdragon the hummingbird this would definitely be the slowest of the 3 although it's very capable phone so let's talk about some of the specs of the device the well sort of show how the specs come together from to a full package so let's jump right ahead and take a look at the browser this is an Android 2.2 device I mean it does have support for flash 10.1 which does work very well really using the browser's where I've seen Android phones either excel or really fall flat a processor time and rendering time often times are a bit slow when using multi-touch browsing so when you zoom in it's not as quick as you'd like although it does appear to be relatively fast on the droid 2 so the processor can more than keep up with that I should go ahead and rotate it of course you've got a landscape view as well browser wise approach exactly expect from a very powerful Android phone that works well I've done a ton of browser reviews on many different phones I'm not gonna rehash it here it just works well and it does have Flash support so if you're looking for a phone like I started to do that look no further than the Droid 2 now I want to sort of wrap all this up and put things together into a full sort of value type a cage with you as phone's gonna set you back just about $200 least at the time this video was filmed and it's hard to recommend this phone not because it's not capable because Verizon has so many other great phones for the same price the excelling point here for me would have been the full QWERTY keyboard which I thought to be very unusual so that's gonna mean what other phones in Verizon's lineup can you pick up well the samsung fascinate can be the same price with that faster hummingbird processor and no full corded keywords you're gonna get a much thinner package if you like motorola sort of enhancements they're blur as features need to look no further than the Droid X right here which is recently just updated to Android 2.2 Froyo as well you're also going to get physical buttons which are not capacitive what some people might prefer can get a larger 4.3 inch screen for the same price so from from a value standpoint something it's a bad phone when it said Verizon has so many other great options in their lineup that makes the joy to very hard to recommend one other sort of small gripe is a camera on the back first of all does not record HD video at 720p like the other phones they just brought in does have a dual LED flash the pictures are not very good they look grainy and gray not very true to their actual colors battery life you're gonna have about a 1400 milliamp hour battery they will say the Droid 2 does very well with battery management I'm very easily able to get a full day out of it which is not something I could say about other Android devices something to sort of bear in mind as well so overall I recommend the joy to not really and again just because there's so many other great phones and Verizon lineup if this phone existed in the vacuum so there wasn't a joint credible there wasn't a samsung fascinate wasn't enjoyed absolutely any other Android phones on Verizon this would be a fantastic buy it's a fast phone it's got a lot of great features a little bit on the thick side because that QWERTY keyboard but because there are so many other choices it's gonna be a hard sell there so on a one to five scale just based on this phone itself I do give it a solid four losing out on the keyboard and the camera I really what prevents it from getting a five and my book so do you agree or disagree over here what you have to say I'm John Rhett endure from TechnoBuffalo share check out the website for all your tech news and for collusive contest chipping at of twitter twitter.com slash down for lakers i'll see in the next video buh-bye you