Motorola Droid Review

 

Motorola has unveiled its brand new mobile DROID. Motorola Droid feels solid and nice phone with a 3.7 inch of touch screen display. Its display is attractive and the device is lightning fast, especially for Android phone. Droid comes with Android 2.0 version of operating system. It is powerful communications and web surfing tool meeting the high standards. Its keyboard is shallow and flat and it makes very difficult to type.

Design:

Motorola Droid comes in an 115.8x60x13.7 mm of dimensions and it weighs around 165g. Droid has TFT capacitive touchscreen with the support of 16M colors. It comes with 480x854 pixels of resolutions with full QWERTY keyboard with 5-way navigation keys. The display resolution provides 409,820 pixels which sounds very great. The keyboard of the device doesn’t take the entire length of the device.

The basic interface is similar to the Android users. You can see three Home screens which you can customize each pane with the help of widgets. In the central pane, you can see the Google Search bar using which you can search whatever you need. The Main menu can be accessed via pull tab which is at the bottom of the display. You can also move the icons and add the shortcuts and folders.

On the display, you have four buttons – Back, Menu, Home and Search. The functionality of these buttons is same as on other Android phones. Droid doesn’t have the physical Talk control. Alternatively, you have to access the calling functions via widget on the display. When you open the Droid to show the physical keyboard, the screen orientation will automatically change. The keys of the keyboard are flush and squashed with each other which makes hard to type the text quickly.

The central OK and toggle buttons, which are in the next to display, are easy to use. It assists you in browsing through the menus and selecting items. Motorola Droid contains Volume controller and camera activation/capture buttons on the left side of the panel. You can also use the 3.5 mm headset jack, which is on the top of the panel, to use your own headset. Camera lens, stereo speakers, and flash are on the rare side of the device. You can also use the microSD card slot by removing the battery on the rare side.

Features:

Motorola Droid offers many of the same core features which are in the Android phones. Droid is the first smartphone to run the Android 2.0 OS which gives new features and interface enhancements. Droid uses 600 MHz of ARM Cortex A8 CPU with PowerVR SGX530 graphics. Android 2.0 has expanded the capabilities of the personal information management tool including calendar, contacts, and email.

Motorola Droid offers native Microsoft Exchange synchronization out of the box for calendar, contacts, and email, in addition to the support for Gmail, IMAP and POP3 accounts. Only Microsoft Exchange and Gmail offer the push delivery, whereas the IMAP and POP3 message are retrieved at user-specified time intervals. Droid helps you to merge the contact information from the various accounts like Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, and Facebook, and it combines them on a single contact card for an individual.

Android 2.0 has brought some of the improvements to the web browser. Droid now supports HTML5. You can add the visual bookmarks and you can also toggle between the multiple windows though the simple list view. This browser doesn’t have the Flash Lite support. It has the plug-in which will support the Adobe Flash Player 10. Motorola Droid comes with GPS/A-GPS with the different Google Maps Navigation app. On Google Maps, you can use the voice-guided, text-to-speech directions. Google Maps offers layered maps with traffic data, Google Latitude, and satellite view.

Motorola Droid supports MP3, eAAC+, WMA9, MP4, WMV9, WAV, and other audio formats. Music quality is very good. You can listen to the songs using 3.5mm headset jack. Even, video playback is also smoother. It doesn’t require much rebuffering. Droid comes with 5 megapixel camera with resolution of 2592x1944 pixels. It has autofocus and dual-LED flash. You can record a video for 30 seconds, if you are adding the video to multimedia message, but you can record up to 30 minutes in Normal Mode. The photo quality is decent, but not impressive. You can record the video at 720x480 pixels of resolutions at 24 frames per second.

Motorola Droid comes with 133 MB of internal memory and 256 MB of RAM. It comes with 8 GB of microSD card which can be extended up to 32 GB. Apart from these, it has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP, 3G, GPRS, and microUSB v2.0.

Performance:

Motorola Droid makes a big rise in the internal performance. Droid is lighting fast, as compared with other Android processors, when opening any applications and menus, scrolling through lists and switching the displays. The call quality of Droid is excellent. There is no problem with hearing the voice. It gets strong and consistent signal. Unfortunately, Droid doesn’t support Bluetooth Voice commands or dialling. You have to select the icon from the Main menu in order to use the Voice Dialer feature.

Motorola Droid offers the Lithium Ion 1400 mAh battery. It gives Standby up to 350 hours and the Talk time is up to 6 hours 30 minutes.

Motorola Droid doesn’t support the dual-mode capability for domestic GSM networks and CDMA networks abroad. So, this disappoints the user who frequently travels abroad.

Motorola BACKFLIP Review

Motorola has introduced latest mobile called “BACKFLIP”. It is the first phone being an Android phone to attract AT&T’s network. This phone runs with Android v1.5 operating system and it can be upgradeable. Its best feature is that it has a unique design which includes QWERTY keyboard in the rear facing in nature along with the trackpad which is situated in the back side of the display.

Design:

As I said above, the best feature about this Motorola BACKFLIP device is its design. By seeing it, you may or may not be impressed with it but most of the times; it looks like Motorola Cliq phone because of its rectangular shape and the rounded edges. BACKFLIP comes with 3.1 inches capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 320x480 pixels. It has a dimension of 108x53x15.3 mm and weighs 133g. Size and resolution are just fine, but user may not get impressed because of its poor sunlight legibility. Its display supports 256K color, but due to Android OS, the color will decrease to 65K. Once the Android version is upgraded with the support for 256K, then it may possibly resolve this issue. But, poor sunlight legibility cannot be fixed.

Capacitive touchscreen is quite responsive. When you open up the keyboard, the UI will rotate to landscape mode automatically. The touch-sensitive buttons have nice haptic feedback and solid backlighting. Apart from the Search key, the typical Android buttons are on hand and the Search key is situated on the QWERTY keyboard.

Motorola BACKFLIP has microUSB port, Volume Controller, and the Camera activation button on it right side of the panel. In the left panel, you won’t see any controls. The microUSB port doesn’t have any protective cap for it. Alternatively, it has a green LED connector which displays light whenever you plug the data cable or charger.

One of the key features of BACKFLIP device is its “Touchpad”. You can see the touchpad in the back side of the screen. It’s a centrally placed touch panel does the trackball job which you can use to scroll and as well as for selecting. You can find the shortcut buttons for messaging and web browser. The keyboard has a 5 megapixel lens and the LED flash.

Features:

Its MOTOBLUR UI comes pre-installed with some nice add-on. You can access social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Along with these social networking sites, you can also access the emails. It has an interface called “Account Manager” which allows you to manage your all social networking sites accounts in one place so that no need to go into each and every application setup account or to delete it. The cool security feature of the MOTOBLUR UI is it allows you to lock your phone remotely and also allows you to wipe your all the information stored in the phone remotely, in case of missing or stolen.

It has a 3.5mm audio jack at the top of the device along with the Power/Lock button. It has a 2GB of microSD card and which can be extended up to 32 GB. It has an internal 256 MB RAM and 512 MB ROM memory. It has a 5 megapixel Camera with the resolution of 2560x1920 pixels. This phone doesn’t have the zoom facility, but in place it has autofocus by which you can get the better quality of the image. This phone supports the MP3, WMA9 player, WAV, eAAC+, and many other audio formats. This device has a Document Viewer which helps you to view the documents without downloading and installing any other app.

In case of networking, it supports GPRS up to 32 to 48 kbps speed and also supports 3G network. It has a Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP, and microUSB v2.0. It offers Google Maps along with the street view.

Motorola BACKFLIP comes with 1400 mAh Lithium Ion with the Standby time of up to 315 hours and the talk time is up to 6 hours.

The build quality of the Motorola BACKFLIP is excellent. Motorola BACKFLIP has already hit the market in March 2010. It costs $99 with 2-year contract. Its full cost is $349.