Motorola Droid 3 review

The third installment of a trilogy is sometimes the foremost satisfying. The Empire Falls, Frodo destroys the hoop, Cinderella goes back in time. (Okay, that’s a stretch.) Our protagonist on this tale is the Droid 3, which bears an uncanny resemblance to its dad and granddad — but Verizon’s added a couple of new components and made some minor design tweaks in try to improve the general experience.

Are these adjustments enough to save lots of the series? The original Droid launched with much fanfare, a tool that steered Motorola back onto the trail of success from its post-RAZR Hades. It had a refreshing gold-laden design that oozed elegance, top-of-the-line specs for its time, and was the pioneer that helped usher Google’s mobile OS right into a new era. Each new iteration has received less attention than the single before, however, and the Droid 3 experienced one of these quiet launch that we blinked and almost missed it. Despite, though — provided that the telephone can speak for itself, it doesn’t need the confetti to accompany it. But is the third time another charm for the Droid? Or will it’s buried by other heavyweights just like the Droid Bionic or Samsung Galaxy S II Function ? Join us after the break to determine.

Hardware

As mentioned earlier, the Droid 3 is a spitting image of its predecessors: the identical large, boxy body, the lower lip extending out from the remainder of the telephone, in addition to that full QWERTY keyboard. But upon closer inspection we found a range of cosmetic differences. Dimensionally, the most recent rendition could be the thinnest of the bunch at only a hair under 13mm (in comparison with 14mm and 13.7mm for the 1st two Droids, respectively), but it is also the biggest. While the 1st two Droid generations had mid-sized 3.7-inch (480 x 854) LCD displays, this one steps as much as a phenomenal 4-inch qHD screen. The bezels at the Droid 3 are thicker and bigger on each side, which unfortunately adds unnecessary heft.

Consequently, the device can be the heaviest of the series, weighing in at 6.49 ounces (184g) when compared with 5.96 ounces and six.0 ounces. Because the Droids have always been a slightly gravity-loving group, a further half ounce amounts to a comparatively minor add-on. Being as relatively heavy because it is, you’ll be tempted to think it is a rock-solid phone without durability concerns in any respect — and you would be right. Motorola fashioned its latest device out of polished metal at the sides and rubberized plastic at the back to make for a more well-off, firm grip. The screen’s also covered with Gorilla Glass for scratch protection. All told, that added depth makes the Droid 3 easier to comprehend, though the bigger size regrettably makes it annoying to hang onto for long periods of time.

A defining feature of the 3 Droids is the lower lip that protrudes from the remainder of the telephone. This cosmetic landmark is as a result making the underside 1/2 the handset — the keyboard half — a little longer than the head half. Not just does this contribute to the phone’s elegant feel and look, it also makes room for a bigger keyboard. Sadly, there’s not much else concerning the Droid 3 that exudes grace or luxury; gone are the gold accents adorning the unique, in addition to the chrome detailing and lightweight blue tint at the second. What we’re left with otherwise is a plain boxy phone with the quality keys. There’s nothing new or innovative here.

Except for that, the latest Droid has made some layout tweaks over the past version. It adds an HDMI port next to the microUSB charger at the left side, swaps the facility button and three.5mm headphone jack up top, and has a marginally retooled volume rocker at the right side. At the back we see a pop-off battery cover (which, incidentally, could be substituted for an inductive wireless charging cover, in the event you prefer), 8 MP shooter with LED flash, and a speaker grill and mic hanging out near the lowest.

Underneath the hood lies a SIM card matching the Droid 3′s international roaming capabilities, in addition to a slot for the microSD. Alas, the telephone doesn’t include a memory card, though Motorola not less than provides us with 16GB of internal storage — enough to carry an excellent selection of apps and multimedia files. If this is not enough, the handset supports a further 32GB of external storage, bringing the complete of 48GB. It is an obvious improvement over the 8GB that came standard with the last-gen Droid 2.

Lastly, there are several significant improvements within the internal hardware department. The Droid 3 houses a 1GHz dual-core TI OMAP4430 processor, 512MB RAM, and a 1450mAh battery (more on that later). Finally, it adds a VGA front-facing camera, while the rear camera got a bump to eight megapixels. The simplest thing spec-wise that we would’ve really appreciated was an LTE radio for superfast broadband access. Riches and glory can be showered upon the Droid 3 because the first full QWERTY on Verizon’s 4G network; without it, however, its success cannot be so easily written in stone.

Having an entire QWERTY device able to engaged on Verizon’s 4G network could potentially become a huge success, given the dearth of variety we have seen in Big Red’s lineup to this point.

Keyboard

Speaking of improvements, the keyboard is the world Motorola seemed to give attention to the foremost. The Droid 2′s board, while better than the unique by a rustic mile, still left lots of room for improvement. Interestingly, the present model steps up by splitting the adaptation between those two keyboards. For example, the keys aren’t as bouncy or rubbery, but in addition they aren’t flat. It’s actually the best balance of give and clickiness — the keys feel natural to type on, and we didn’t experience any learning curve, making it a decided improvement over the Droid 2. The sliding mechanism’s a piece stiff, though usable; if given the selection we’d rather have it err at the side of solid instead of flimsy.

We also applaud HelloMoto for including a row of dedicated number keys. It is a major frustration for us when companies omit this from QWERTY keyboards, because it throws off our “typing groove” — having to prevent mid-sentence to seek down the ALT or Fn keys and manually enter each number really breaks up the flow.

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Motorola also appeared to learn its lesson from the debacle that was the unique Droid’s direction pad, because it was retooled for the second one-gen devices and remains in tact this time around. The d-pad is far smaller and relegated to the lower right corner of the keyboard, which leaves enough space to make every individual key larger and easier to press.

The keys also are backlit, which makes it very much easier to text and email at night or in a darkened room. Here is infinitely better than being forced to exploit the onscreen keyboard a good way to see what we’re writing. With that said, however, the virtual version of the ‘board remains to be a breeze to make use of. On top of the default Moto keyboard, the Droid 3 comes with Swype pre-installed as an option. We remember that many folks have love-hate relationships with Swype, and masses of it is determined by its accuracy; in this device, however, we felt it handled our need for typing speed well, with few incorrect guesses.

Camera

The Droid 3′s camera sounds great, right? An 8 megapixel shooter with 1080p video capture will never be anything to bicker about on a high-end smartphone. Problem is, it isn’t all about megapixel count — and it doesn’t work in Moto’s favor here.

It was disappointing in finding that the dedicated camera button, proudly emblazed at the right side of both previous Droids, has mysteriously disappeared — very like with the 5 Droid X2 5 . We remember that a dedicated camera button would possibly not work for skinnier handsets, but there’s good enough heft at the Droid 3 to permit a niche for it. Worse still, there has been also no ability to manually adjust contrast or exposure to our own liking.

We also encountered issues with the camera software itself. On a couple of occasion the viewfinder froze. Usually, the bug would resolve itself once we converted to video mode and back again. We even had some problems getting the camera app to initialize, which we resolved by restarting the telephone. Most of the time, the camera would take its sweet time focusing — especially in low light. Therefore, we weren’t capable of catch a whol lot of impromptu moments.

When we were ready to make it through an entire photo session using the camera, the photographs turned out to be mediocre — they definitely weren’t up on par with comparable smartphones which include the Samsung Galaxy S II. Colors were slightly washed out in bright daylight and ill-defined under overcast conditions, with objects appearing shadowy in low light.

In testing the video, we found that movements generally appear smooth. Now and then, however, it felt just like the camcorder had a tricky time maintaining with us. Taking video of stationary objects was better, though it wouldn’t remain focused indoors or in low-light — anytime we breathed, not to mention moved, the lens had to re-focus. Every so often we noticed brief periods (read: lower than half a second) wherein certain parts of the viewfinder would go dark.

Software

There’s much rejoicing within the recent disappearance of the MotoBlur name, and we were incredibly relieved in addition up the Droid 3 and never be required to check in or register for Motorola’s UI experience. Rather, the currently-nameless user interface at the Droid 3 was a breath of unpolluted air, though it, too, has some cons.

The Droid 3 received a miles-needed boost to Android 2.3, a feat that the others haven’t yet accomplished (officially, anyways). Motorola chose to throw in a couple of stock Gingerbread elements, but it is easy to identify a great deal of customization scattered layered on top of the OS. Here, you navigate the app tray by swiping left or right, and you have got the choice of filtering apps by groups (a protracted-press of an app ends up in the selection of sending it to the house screen or attaching it to 1 of these groups). Motorola also threw in its own keyboard and dialpad, but opted for the stock music player and browser.

Aside from the app tray, most shortcuts remained the identical, with one refreshing exception. We discovered that pressing the house button twice from the most screen panel would take us on to an app of our choice. We were ready to change it to at least one of several different apps simply by finding the choice within the settings menu.

We were greeted by the identical bloatware we’ve come to expect with any Android device on Verizon’s networks: the standard VCAST suite, in addition to Let’s Golf 2 (did anyone ever play the 1st one?), MOTOPRINT, GoToMeeting, QuickOffice, NFL Mobile, Slacker, and a few proprietary social networking apps. As always, there isn’t any strategy to cast off these apps, so that you just ought to get to work hiding them out of your usual viewing routine by grouping them together and using your personal customized groups as a default.

Performance

So far as performance goes, the Droid 3 is filled with hits and misses. For a dual-core CPU, it performed with none lagging, per se. However, we grew impatient of the countless animations Motorola threw into its UI, every one taking not less than two to 3 seconds to finish before moving directly to the requested task. Examples include lengthy in-and-out transitions between menus, additional time to access shortcuts (corresponding to the house key long-press and double-press), and opening up programs just like the phone and Market. We all know, we all know, this sounds incredibly picky, however the fact is when using the telephone inside the day, 2-3 seconds for every transition eats up lots of unnecessary time. The phone’s hardware still functions admirably, however the UI effects are somewhat frustrating.

In our 2 benchmarking tests 2 , Quadrant scored 2324; Linpack processed at 44.076 MFLOPS (single-thread) and 66.378 MFLOPS (multi-thread). Nenamark 1 came back at 46.4fps, and Neocore offered a whopping speed of 58.2fps. Sunspider results were only a smidge over 4000ms (4091, to be exact). There has been only one matter of curiosity that we couldn’t quite explain: whenever we attempted to run the Nenamark 2 benchmark at the Droid 3, it froze. Every. Single. Time. Restarts, master resets, and app re-installs weren’t capable of resolve it. We will not draw any conclusions in this, since everything else ran perfectly fine, but we’re definitely stumped.

The Droid 3 comes with a 1450mAh battery, but you’ll definitely need a charger if you are far from home longer than a number of hours. In our standard rundown test (we begin at 100% and loop video endlessly until the battery dies) the telephone lasted for 4 hours and quarter-hour. Our everyday use tests fared better — we got nearly 10 hours of juice out of it when pushing emails, social networking, doing a moderate amount of web browsing, and capturing and videos. Still, we need to get an entire day’s use out of our smartphone if possible, though not less than this could be long enough to hide a typical eight-hour workshift.

Wrap-Up

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Attempting to live as much as an outstanding name is a heavy responsibility to take upon ourselves, and smartphones are not any , either. Such is the load of the Droid 3, being slapped with the obligation of impressing the loads to an identical degree as its original namesake. Sadly, it feels as if the most recent rendition of this tune is more of a swan song. It’s had an excellent run, however the Droid series appears to be like fading. In no way are we suggesting this can be the last of its kind — only Verizon and Motorola can truly answer that query — but rather than seeing a similar elegance, poise, or confidence exuded by the series’ firstborn, we see another blocky phone. Looks aside, we enjoyed its dual-core performance, though it’s somewhat inhibited by UI effects.

Given the curious timing of the Droid 3′s arrival paired with the Downy-soft launch, we’re left to wonder what happened to it. Was it pushed out just before its pre-arranged time, its marketing dollars put aside for a far more hype-worthy Motorola 3 Droid Bionic 3 or Samsung Function launch? The Droid 3, with its top-notch keyboard and high-end specs (save for its 3G radio), is a phone we wouldn’t mind using everyday, but we’re sensing something grander lurking just beyond the horizon.

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This post is tagged: cosmetic differences, design tweaks, full qwerty keyboard, heavyweights, predecessors, spitting image, uncanny resemblance