Hands-On: Motorola Droid Bionic
Jan 5, 2011, 9:26 PM by Rich Brome @richbrome
We had some hands-on time with the new Droid Bionic for Verizon. Read on to see what we thought of Motorola's first 4G LTE phone.
source: Motorola
Hardware
The Driod Bionic is a simple slab phone with a large display. Actually, it's a pretty huge display. It's LCD, but it has the same sub-pixel issues as some OLED displays, so a thin line looks more like a very fine dotted line than a smooth line. That's a nit-pick, though, as it doesn't affect usability. Reading text or looking at photos, it looks great.
It's a big phone in all dimensions. Think Droid X, without the thin-ness. It's all plastic, and very light. Considering only the size-weight ratio, it feels a bit cheap, but the build quality feels top-notch.
The touch keys below the display work well. Physical keys would be easier to use. The physical keys on the top and side - for locking and volume - feel and work well. We're very disappointed to see no dedicated camera key.
Software
The Droid Bionic isn't launching until the second quarter, so the software isn't optimized yet, but all of the key features are there are work well in our playtime with it. There wasn't much to test the dual-core processor with, and again the software isn't optimized, so we can't speak much to performance.
The Bionic is a Verizon "Droid" phone, and "with Google". For whatever reason, it's not a "Blur" phone, although it does have a lot of the Blur goodies, like the wonderful re-sizable Motorola home screen widgets.
The camera interface is decent, with a pop-out drawer of standard options, including a few scene modes. There could be more on-screen controls, though. The refresh rate is one of the faster ones we've seen, perhaps hinting at the power of the graphics chip. Unfortunately, the lack of a camera button mean you're stuck using an on-screen button in the top-right corner to fire off shots.
About the author, Rich Brome:Editor in Chief Rich became fascinated with cell phones in 1999, creating mobile web sites for phones with tiny black-and-white displays and obsessing over new phone models. Realizing a need for better info about phones, he started Phone Scoop in 2001, and has been helming the site ever since. Rich has spent two decades researching and covering every detail of the phone industry, traveling the world to tour factories, interview CEOs, and get every last spec and photo Phone Scoop readers have come to expect. As an industry veteran, Rich is a respected voice on phone technology of the past, present, and future.
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Comments
YAY! No blur!!!!!
