Verizon Wireless Motorola Droid Bionic
Phone
The Verizon Wireless Motorola Droid Bionic has been hyped and that can turn into a problem if it doesn’t live up to the expectations of the hype. Does this live up to the hype? The look of the phone is similar to that of the Droid X and X2 by Verizon with some slight modifications. It also has some resemblances to that of the Verizon Wireless Droid 3, with the addition LTE 4G and minus the slide out keyboard.
The Bionic of course it links with Facebook, Twitter, and now the new Google+ data (contact’s photo and profile info) in the address book however it is a few extra clicks to make it all link. The applications are not pre-installed however they can be added through the market with ease! There is also a favorite callers list that is displayed at the top of the main home screen and only shows 5 favorites to choose from, however if you drag it down it opens up the list of all the favorites instead of just the top 5.
There is a quick launch for the phone at the bottom of the screen; it is a little green button with a phone. The placement of it was in a spot that took me some time to get used to; it’s set up more like a quick launch app would be instead of being a permanent fixture at the bottom of the screen. The clarity of the phone is good there were no problems with people being able to hear me. However, there was some complaints from people hearing background noise and it was extremely loud to them. It was anything from riding in the car with the windows up and no radio on and the person on the other end would ask if I was walking outside or if the windows were down.
The Verizon Wireless Motorola Droid Bionic has the normal touch screen droid keyboard. It was difficult to go back to correct mistakes on the texts or emails that may have been in the words, because there is no back arrows. There is a curser at the top inside the text box that can be moved, but it doesn’t always go into the spot that is wanted, so most of the time just deleting the whole word or phrase and retyping it was easier then trying to back up to the problem.
Design
The Verizon Wireless Motorola Droid Bionic has It is running the 4G LTE with a dual core processor TI OMAP running at 1 GHz with a full 1 GB of RAM. There is almost 3.5 gigabytes available for app installation and an extra 8 GB accessible for internal storage for pictures, music, or anything else! It also includes a pre-installed 16 GB MicroSD card as well. There will be no shortage of space available for all the phone can do!
Even with all the storage and the extremely fast processor something is going to suffer, battery life, but that is no surprise to anyone all the power and speed always comes with a price.
It also has the built in voice input on any text field and it works very well as long as you are not in an area with large amounts of background noise or in a car with road noise, them it will not pick it up.
There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top right side and the power/sleep button on top left side. The volume rocker on the right side of the Droid Bionic and Micro USB and the HDMI connections are on the left side toward the bottom of the phone.
There are quick launch touch keys for menu, back, home and search below the screen.
Display
The Verizon Wireless Motorola Droid Bionic has a large 4.3 inch display covered in Gorilla Glass. The display is 540 x 960 and that is the best that an Android smart-phone can buy right now. This is very nice and makes the images and text look crisp and clear.
Camera
The camera is an 8 megapixel on the rear of the devise with a 1080p recording capabilities and a front facing webcam for video chat with 480x640 resolution. The front facing camera also has an ambient light sensor which is tucked away. The rear camera does not default to the 8MP it does default to a slightly lower resolution of 6MP, but that is easily changed.
The rear video recorder captures 1080p HD video and also has HDMI port to be able to share the videos on your big screen! It also includes a 0.3 MP front facing webcam it makes it simple to video chat with your friends. As the rear camera the video camera doesn’t default to 1080p HD it is set to default at 720p but just like to camera this is easy to change.
There is a quick launch for the camera at the bottom of the screen, when you first look at it the icon doesn’t really look like a camera it looks more like a front load washing machine, but that is the quick launch for the camera!
Battery Life
Most smart-phone users have concluded by now that no matter the phone in use it will have to charge every day.
Personal note: I did manage to go two full days without charging it but by the end of day two it was in desperate need of a charge! I am sure if I ran it like I do my personal devise I would have never gotten away with 2 days of battery.
Interface
The Verizon Wireless Motorola Droid Bionic runs the Android 2.3 which runs on the latest version of Gingerbread OS with the Motorola Application Platform that runs five home screens.
The Verizon Wireless Motorola Droid Bionic never slowed and scrolling between pages or up and down long lists happened without hesitation. The user interface is wickedly fast and responsive. It does have to Dual Core Processor however that doesn’t mean anything to the average consumer they operate the same as a single core processor but where you notice the biggest difference is in the graphics, gaming, and the video output feature. The Dual Core Processor also helps with the battery life. Anyone who is a seasoned Droid user knows that the battery’s do not last for any extended length of time and the Dual Core Processor helps with saving on the battery because it doesn’t make the phone work as hard. The Verizon Wireless Motorola Droid Bionic having the Dual Core Processor doesn’t seem to help with the battery life, it is running on the 4G LTE network and that tends to take all of the extra that is saved by the processor.
Web
It has a full HTML browser. It is integrated with Flash 10.1 for web browsing so viewing most sites with flash files is not a problem.
Pinch-zoom pages in as far as you want, you get a nice screen shot of bookmarked pages, and they can all be viewed in landscape or vertical configurations.
Conclusion
The Verizon Wireless Motorola Droid Bionic seems to be a hybrid of the Motorola Droid 3 and the Motorola Droid X and/or X2. It is a great phone for someone who wants all the power and versatility of the Droid OS on the Verizon Wireless 4G LTE lightning fast network.
Specs
Processor: Dual Core 1Ghz processor
Storage: 1GB of LP DDR2 RAM / 16GB Internal memory / 16GB MicroSD card (pre-installed)
Screen: 4.3-inch qHD 960 x 540 Touch Screen Display w/ Gorilla Glass
Camera: 8MP rear with Auto-focus with 1080p HD recording and 0.3 front facing camera for video chatting
Audio: 3.5mm headset jack / HDMI Port
Connectivity: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS
Weight: 5.6 ounces
Battery: 1735 mAH Li-ION – Usage (approx) 10.8 Hours– Standby Time (approx) 8.3 Days
Opinion Author: Kris Russo, NBC25 Account Executive
