Droid Generations: OG to Bionic, Impressions

When the first Verizon Droid-branded Android phone came out (November 2009) I pre-ordered it and picked it up the day it was released.  I had been using a Blackberry for a while, and a Treo before that (and “dumb” phones before that), and I was really intrigued by all the things I was reading about with the new generation of touch-friendly phones (and more than a little jealous of the people I saw walking around with their fancy toys).  So when VZW announced (or it was leaked, same difference) the Motorola Droid (aka the OG), I was eager to get on board.  (I was never a fan of Apple and the iPhone; I like to play with my toys, and to tweak them, and there’s no way I’d get that from an iPhone then… probably not now, either.)

Long story short, I’ve been using the OG Droid pretty much every day for the past 2 years, and always really liked it – it’s a solidly built phone with a decent keyboard, a screen that on release blew everything else away, and it had served me faithfully through upgrades and rooting and custom ROMs and everything else you can subject a phone with an unlocked boot loader to.  The problem, though, was speed (or lack thereof).  VZW’s 3G network – slow.  The OG’s cpu and lack of memory – slow.  Apps took forever to load and to run, the phone was laggy, browsing  was painful, you get the idea.  When the Droid Bionic was announced back in January – dual core! 4G!  big screen! – it seemed like the ideal phone, something that’d blow everything out of the water.  It probably would have, too, had it come out when promised.  8 months later, and around 5 months later than planned, it’s finally out – and I went and picked one up on release day again, despite all the other lust-worthy phones that’ve recently come out (or been announced).

Anyways, a bunch of people have eagerly asked me what I thought of it.  It’s too early for a review – I’ve had it for less than 24 hours.  But I figured some early impressions might be worthwhile.

First off, it’s worth repeating: the Bionic was the phone of the future, but that was 8 months ago.  Now?  It’s the phone of today.  (Better today than yesterday, but a smart phone loses a bit of lustre over 8 months.)

If you’re not familiar with it, it’s got a 4.3″ qHD screen, 8MP camera, 1 GHz dual-core CPU, 1 G of RAM, VZW LTE/CDMA radios, runs Android 2.3.4, and has an impressive 32G of storage it ships with (16G internal, 16G in a card – but you can replace that with a 32G card if you really want a lot of space on your phone).  Great specs – but nothing earth-shattering.   Phones like the Samsung Galaxy S2 and the HTC Evo 3D have similar specs, and in some cases some fancy benefits like a Super AMOLED Plus screen or dual cameras and glasses-free 3D, so the Bionic has an uphill battle right out of the gate.

So, without further ado, some impressions (and if you haven’t figured it out by now, my writing style is ‘wordy and rambling’):

• It’s surprisingly light for a phone with a solid build.  It’s lighter than the OG, despite being considerably longer and wider, and is very comfortable in the hand for most tasks.  If you use the volume, power, and capacitive buttons often, though, it’s a bit of a stretch.  (I do a lot of news/ blog reading on mine, and use the volume keys to go to the prev/ next story, and the capacitive buttons to save posts or send them to people, so that’s taking some getting used to – can’t do it all with a single hand without shifting things around a bit.)  It looks nice, though, and has gorilla glass protecting its front (meaning it’s nearly indestructible – anything that can scratch the screen would go straight through a screen protector, without exaggeration, so don’t waste your money).
• It’s fast, and oh-so-smooth.  I was a bit shocked by this – I’ve played with some newer Android phones, and this has by far the smoothest feel of any of them I’ve seen when sliding around – there’s no delay, no hiccups, no hesitation.  Maybe there are others like this, too, but none I’ve seen.  It’s silky.
• It’s Motoblurred.  This is a downer for me – I’m a big fan of vanilla Android, and this almost was a deal-breaker for me.  (Still may be.)  Interestingly enough, though, the motoblur home screen is actually much more smooth and responsive than other replacements like Launcher Pro and ADW.  I suspect that it uses 3D hardware acceleration to manage this – something a generic launcher generally won’t offer, one of the ‘flaws’ of the open software/ hardware combo that Google is juggling.  The iPhone is so smooth because its interface is optimized for the one type of hardware it’s going to run on – versus being optimized to run on as many hardware platforms as possible.  Motorola seems to have stolen a page or two from Apple, in a good way.  However – Motoblur is still Motoblur, and other than performance, it’s worse than the stock launcher in pretty much every way.  The icons are ugly and hard to decipher, it’s much clunkier to use, doing basic tasks like adding shortcuts take many more clicks, etc.  If they’d drop that crap and just use the stock launcher – but bolt hardware acceleration into it – I’d be much happier.
• Battery life: only on my first day, but so far, it looks terrible.  After 7 and a half hours of unplugged moderate- to heavy- usage, I’m down to 20% battery.  Now a few disclaimers: normally I take some battery-saving measures, like flipping to airplane mode on the subway, because Android (or maybe all smartphones) seem to be terrible about managing their battery when they can’t reach the network (as far as I can guess, they sit there trying to find a tower and reconnect repeatedly, and it just drains the battery in no time.  My OG suffered from the same problem – an hour on the subway would actually burn battery faster than doing something like streaming video on the phone), and I have not been taking those precautions with this phone so far.  I wanted to see how it was out of the box without any real tweaks or cheats.  Anyways, so far, I’m really unimpressed – it has a nice big 1700+ mAH battery and it still can’t handle it.  VZW’s LTE (“4G”) radios are known for being terrible about battery life, so my next test will be to flip back to 3G and see how that impacts its life.  (I’m guessing that it may just about double it.)
  Update: 8h 47m, 5% warning just popped up.  Looks like around 9.5 hours, including 45 minutes on the subway, is all it’ll manage on its first day.  Great.  Take out the subway time, and you’re up 10-11 hours of moderately heavy usage w/ LTE enabled, per charge.  Time to look into extended life batteries…
  Update: made it another 55 minutes or so – a little over 9 and a half hours, before it died.
  Update: with 4G disabled, and with 2 subway rides, plus 2 hours in a data center (i.e. multiple situations w/ lousy reception, i.e. heavy battery usage), it has made it to 14 hours and 22 minutes and is at 5% battery – figure 15-16 hours before it completely dies.  My guess is that with good reception and 4G disabled, you could make it almost 20 hours.  Right now, cell standby accounts for 35% of the time and wifi for another 26%, with phone idle at another 23%.  I don’t know if I buy those numbers, but theoretically with wifi off, 4G off, and good reception, you could probably go over 24 hours without issues.  We’ll find out tomorrow.  ;)
  Update: With 4G disabled it went for 16 hours.  With wifi and 4g both disabled, it actually went through battery faster… around 13 hours.  :(
• The screen is a blessing and a curse.  It’s apparently the same basic screen as on the Atrix and the X2, it’s a pentile qHD 4.3″ monster.  The resolution is high and it’s shockingly bright and readable even in direct sunlight, thanks to the pentile display.  However, the flip side of the pentile display is that it also has a grainy, pixelated sort of look to images with patches of flat colors or gradations, due to the way the pixels are laid out on the screen itself.  It actually looks a lot like the old color comics printed in newspapers – or if you prefer, like the flesh tones on a Lichtenstein print.  I’m not a fan of it, but I have to admit, in casual day-to-day use I don’t really notice it (but it’s obvious if you look closely).  The reality is that most photos are not comprised of smooth gradients but collections of jumbled pixels – especially jpgs, and so most when viewing photos and videos, it looks ok.  App interfaces, though, are typically not photos but are (drumroll) blocks of color gradients, so you notice it more there.
• So far, 4G seems a little over-rated, but admittedly I don’t watch a lot of videos on my phone and I don’t stream a lot of music onto it, either.  (I also don’t download a lot of large apps or docs, either, having been trained by the minimal space in my OG.)  I’ve got Pandora and Youtube and Vevo installed, though, so I may be able to give you better feedback here soon.  I will say this, though – I was able to start streaming a movie over Netflix in something like 3 seconds, which is actually a lot less time than it takes my PS3 to buffer it at home over my DSL line.
• Pre-installed apps: ugh.  Seriously, why do these vendors do it?  But you can hide them from the app drawer, which is nice.
• The camera’s decent – neither great nor terrible.  It seems much better than the camera on the Droid 3, and better (but not dramatically so) than the OG’s camera, but it’s not going to win any awards for picture quality.  Still, it works, and for those of you interested it’ll record 1080p video (haven’t tested this yet… not a major selling point for me).

So, there you go.  I’m debating whether I’ll keep it or wait for the holy-grail-held-by-bigfoot-riding-on-a-winged-unicorn-flying-over-the-loch-ness-monster that is the “Droid Prime” or “Nexus Prime” or the “Galaxy Prime” or whatever it’s called – supposedly an improved and reworked replacement for the missing Samsung Galaxy SII on VZW, running vanilla Android (Ice Cream Sandwich!) on Verizon’s  LTE network w/ a giant 4.65″ Super AMOLED Plus screen running w/ higher pixel density than the iPhone 4.  (I think it also mows your lawn and gets you a cold beer during the game and gives you blowjobs when no one’s looking, but those are just rumors.)  If I do decide to keep it, I’ll post a review in a week or two.  And if not, I’ll let you know how it goes as I resume my search for Nessie.  ;)