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Motorola Droid Review

2009-11-08
hey guys jon rettinger here three do for you of the motorola droid those need to follow the channel you'll know we put it through a series of tests I've compared with the iphone I've done browser speed I've compared it with the storm two I've gone over the feature set now showing you the turn-by-turn navigation but now for the review I'm going to get down and dirty can talk to you about the phone as a whole how all those little bits and pieces come together too well you can give a positive or negative experience so first and foremost the droid is a phone despite the marketing hype it's got to make good phone calls it's not just for internet and all the other things that the droid does it's got to make quality phone calls I'm happy to report that it does whether that's attributed to motorola's hardware of verizon's network I'm not quite sure the radio in here is a very strong was able to get five bars of verizon's 3g signal whereas on the storm two is only able to get three or four so quite strong and you should be able to get pretty good reception anywhere you go call quality was fantastic people reported no white noise on their end and it sounded almost a landline like on my end speakerphone was quite left quite loud which I tribute to a very large speaker in the back one of the louder speaker phones I've heard probably second only to the AT&T tilt two so the speaker phones important to you you're going to really enjoy the motorola droid so all the phone stuff aside it makes good phone calls how does everything else come together this is a very hyped device and there's a lot of interest behind it so let's talk about it first I am extremely impressed with motorola's design team the fact that they got a phone with a 3.7 inch screen and a full qwerty keyboard to be that thin is amazing it's starting to make other devices which used to look thin look downright fat looking at you i phone one of the things that I really like about the screen is obviously that it's capacitive it's very bright it's responsive and it works well I'm a big fan of the capacitive navigation buttons on the bottom eyelid it takes some getting used to there's some haptic feedback which means when you touch it they vibrate but they do work quite well and they're your standard array of droid buttons of Android button rather your back button your menu your home button and even have a search button so if you're worried about how that would work without being actual buttons to push don't be concerned so one of the downsides five megapixel camera motorola was claiming it's capable of shooting full DVD quality video which let me tell you it is not i did a sample of a video where i showed you my cat you can see the video quality was not fantastic things like say the HTC hero or even the droid eris for verizon have the same sort of camera sensor but take much much much much better video so perhaps how we fixed the firmware upgrade the picture quality the video is average not as good as Motorola's claiming just wanted to give you a heads up browser wise is fantastic this is the closest browser i have seen two matching mobile safari on the iphone which i've got on the record is saying is i think is the best mobile browser this is a really close second it renders pages in natural true HTML it looks like you'd see on your desktop computer the only thing i think it was missing that i really got accustomed to with multi-touch but i'm able to forgive that completely because this phone renders pages quickly and does a fantastic job you can tap to zoom and you can zoom in or out using the navigation sorry the magnifying plus or minus it works very well and of course you have accelerometer so you turn it it'll rotate and you can view the pages that way as well one of the tests that i always run is how quick scrolling is on a lot of devices if you're viewing a pretty intensive web page and you scroll through real quickly you'll see sort of a checkerboard pat on the bottom as a processor is sort of struggling to load what's coming below it i did not have that problem with the droid it always loaded what i wanted to unload it very quickly which is a fantastic benefit to the device because it does do a lot so let's talk about android to point out which of course is the operating system that's running the motorola droid it's un-- skin that means is doesn't have sort of a layer on top of it like the sense UI that you see it to HTC hero and the droid eris or even touch flo 3d like you see on HTC devices that are running windows mobile this is running Android to point out as Google created it and enjoy two point oh really brings android into its own I think it was always sort of a fun project and was never really up to snuff for some of the other mobile platforms to point o really brings it up to par with the rest if not above them it's easy to use it's relatively easy to navigate I think it's intuitive the widget functionality is great the home screens fact you could have three of them and customize them any way you want it's really fantastic and as an extra bonus the fact that you now get free turn-by-turn directions with google maps navigation which is still in beta is great great to the ladies voices super robotic but it works really well and have a free navigation option really nice you know cell companies love to charge you a few extra bucks for the TeleNav surface service whether it's verizon you know maps or ATT navigator sprint navigate or whatever it is they'd love to charge a few extra bucks and Google is actually saying no and I give Verizon credit for letting motorola and google put this on the device let it be used certainly taking money out of pocket that's increasing the user experience so very happy that they allow them them to do that so guys in conclusion I'm broken down everything about the device in previous videos this is probably the single best device and verizon stable if you're a Verizon user I would have no reservations about recommending this to you one of the big downsides that I do want to bring up though is the full qwerty keyboard and I've talked about this in previous videos not sure why but the motor oil engineers decided to put a full very large nicely functioning d-pad next to the keyboard which makes it keys a little bit smaller if you can see right there there's no doming on the keys at all but almost feel like a flat surface had a very hard time getting used to the keyboard now I'm using this phone for about two weeks so it's been a very hard adjustment process now I'm not saying you won't get used to it it just takes time and sign as accurate as you would like actually found myself using the on-screen keyboard more than I was using the physical keyboard so one little downside is the full qwerty board not the best but in a sea of positives a few little negatives are not going to track from a device think it's absolutely fantastic phone probably the best phone i've seen since the iphone i think it rivals the iphone which is what it's been compared to obviously in commercials in terms of quality OS features fact it's even more open I didn't say that this could possibly even be better than the iphone it is a fantastic device one that I can wholeheartedly recommend and this is only the second phone on a one to five star scale i have given a full five stars can't recommend this phone enough if you had any reservations about the droid don't check out your verizon store and get a chance to use it about several i think you're going to like it I certainly know i do if i was a verizon user i would be using this as my daily driver it would be in my pocket all the time so guys hope you enjoyed for exclusive contents checking out a twitter twitter.com / john for lakers and if you want all your tech news check out TechnoBuffalo calm where you can create your own sub blog and monetize it and make your own money and interact with other users in our built-in social network and of course the URL for that is TechnoBuffalo calm and i hope you guys enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next video bye bye
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