Would a Droid X by another name smell as sweet? Once we reviewed that phone last year we found it to be an excellent performer in a great chassis. Briefly: an amazing phone. Now it’s back with a brand new name, or a revised one not less than, the Motorola Droid X2 offering the similar basic design as its predecessor but packing much more heat at the inside — a dual-core dose of Tegra 2, to be specific. Will it tickle your olfactory sensors like the first X?
Hardware
Out of the box there is not lots to distinguish the X2 from its postscript-free predecessor. In truth, little has changed from a design standpoint, so we cannot be delving quite as deep here as we did with the primary X. There’s much an identical sleek, slim design that’s thin for many of the chassis, fattening up on the top to make room for what seems to be an identical 8 megapixel sensor with dual-LED flash. This protrusion makes everything a little bit top-heavy and a stubborn occupant of your skinny jeans in case you attempt to shove it in head-first, but that little bit of extra junk is the only real little bit of flab on what’s otherwise a trim handset.
At its thickest, the end, it’s 9.99mm (0.39-inches). Its 65.5mm width and 127.5mm height (5- x 2.5-inches) make room for a major, bright 4.3-inch LCD up front that’s moved as much as qHD for the reason that X — a majestic 960 x 540 resolution. Viewing angles are incredible as is contrast, making this probably the greatest displays we’ve yet seen on a handset. It doesn’t quite have that look of the Super AMOLED Plus displays Samsung was packing on phones just like the Galaxy S II or the Infuse 4G , but its brightness, contrast, color reproduction, and most significantly resolution make it a terribly strong contender.
Situated beneath the underside bezel are the identical four physical buttons found at the original Droid X — a pleasing touch but still a little skinny and still slightly hard to press without really giving ‘em a decent squeeze. As at the original X that isn’t necessarily a foul thing, but it’s certainly an unfamiliar feel if you are used to incidentally dropping on your home screen with a wayward stroke out of your thumb.
At the bottom of the left side a mini-USB and micro-HDMI port are nestled, the latter curiously situated a number of fractions of a millimeter below the previous. Details. Unfortunately a swapped orientation on these takes any hopes of compatibility with the Atrix dock and throws it out the window. Up top the three.5mm headphone jack is offset to the left, and a sparkly lock / power button is situated within the middle. An appropriate side has just a chrome volume rocker while the underside has, well, nothing — just the slightest hint of a chin.
Like before, the battery cover is firmly held in place by an asymmetrical series of clasps that fit into an asymmetrical series of grooves. The 1,500mAh battery requires a great tug to extract from its cubby, showing the tight tolerances at play here. An 8GB microSD can then be slipped out, and if that seems a little paltry in nowadays of the 32GB chips offered in phones just like the Charge, well, it’s. But, an extra 4GB of user-accessible storage lies inside the phone, meaning you truly have 12GB here to play with. Plus, there’s roughly another 1.5GB in there for apps and such.
Something you will not find under the back cover is a slot for a SIM card. Which is, after all , because it is a strictly 3G phone in an increasingly LTE world.
Performance and battery life
The two in X2 in fact stands for the second one processor core that’s been tucked away inside here, Tegra 2 running at 1GHz. As a couple those cores deliver solid performance, starting with a snappy boot and increasing during every task you could throw at it in today’s Android ecosystem. It’s definitely a powerhouse, evidenced by its benchmark scores. Neocore delivered 54.6, Linpack 36.229 MFLOPS, Quadrant 2,509, and SunSpider completed in exactly a hair over 4,000ms. Impressive numbers.
Despite that performance the telephone offers respectable battery life. It isn’t great, not matching the 0 Droid Charge 0 or the Infuse (which, admittedly, are packing bigger cells), however the loss of LTE here means this phone should get you thru a whole day of typical usage. We made it through one earthly revolution and well right into a second of casual e-mail and surfing usage before running for an AC outlet, but when boot up Google Nav and get some Google Music streaming within the background and you will quickly be reaching for that car charger, as with any Android handset.
GPS performance, however, is incredibly good. The telephone locked directly to our location in seconds and refused to let it go, and kept a superior wireless connection whenever this sort of connection was available. Oh, and the way is it as a phone? Again quite good. The earpiece speaker is loud and clear, as is the speakerphone built into the back.
Camera
We are not seeing any major differences within the camera hardware here because the original Droid X, much of what we saw before still applies here. Images are a piece under-exposed every so often but overall quality is amazingly good, and the triple-mic setup delivers great audio for video shooting. Curiously, though, recording still tops out at 720p despite the considerably improved pixel-pushing hardware on offer, and Motorola sadly chose to put off both-stage dedicated camera button. A shame for shutter bugs.
Software
The Droid X2 ships with Android 2.2.2 installed, however has after all been customized by Motorola. Frankly, though, we found most customizations to be good ones. There isn’t any heavy 1 Blur 1 applied to the experience, and also you wouldn’t have to log in separately as in previous Moto phones. The Swype keyboard is pre-installed, however the customized multi-touch keyboard continues to be quite good, offering reliable predictions of what you meant to type and what your next word may be besides.
Text selection is made easy with an iOS-style popup magnifying glass, while Moto provides a lot of attractive widgets for purchasing the forecast, enabling the phone’s various radios, and controlling media playback.
There are naturally a collection of applications pre-installed that you will have whether you desire them or not. Many apps are mostly unwanted, just like the ubiquitous Lets Golf 2. Some apps would be wanted by some, like NFL Mobile and Best Buy, and a few at the moment are quite useful, like Quickoffice and Verizon’s Backup Assistant. Thankfully it isn’t quite the onslaught of crapware we have seen with devices just like the Charge or more recently the 2 Incredible 2 2 , and we had no problem uninstalling most of them. That said, in case you are feeling noncommittal you should use the customized applications list to create a gaggle of the apps you really use and set the telephone to display only those, hiding your complete big mess. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
Wrap-up
The $200 Droid X2 is unquestionably a worthy successor to the Droid X name. The design still cuts a striking profile and naturally the hot dual-core processor won’t leave you wanting. However, the shortcoming of LTE connectivity just might. Sure, Verizon hasn’t exactly managed to get us locked in coast-to-coast with its flavor of 4G, but enough places are already online to make LTE compatibility a fascinating feature. That the X2 doesn’t have it needs to be seen as a shortcoming.
Still, with the X2 you’re getting a slim phone with good battery life and intensely good build quality. For now, it is the best Android handset on Verizon in case you aren’t quite able to decide to the fourth G.
Myriam Joire contributed to this review.
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