Motorola Droid Bionic (Verizon Wireless)
The Motorola Droid Bionic ($299) is a many absolute Android phone we can buy today, so it’s a Editors’ Choice for touch-screen handsets on Verizon Wireless. If you’re looking for lightning-fast Internet access, top-notch apps, and singular features, this is your phone. Yeah, sure, something improved will always be entrance around a corner. But for now, zero utterly matches a dual-core, LTE energy of a Droid Bionic—and it transforms into a laptop or a desktop PC.
Physical Features and Voice Calling
Handsome and good built, a Motorola Droid Bionic is vast during 2.6 by 5 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and 5.6 ounces. It’s solid, and not too thick, with a silken Gorilla Glass front and a soft-touch back. Like other phones with 4.3-inch screens, it’s a pocket-buster, yet no some-more so than Verizon‘s competing HTC Thunderbolt ($249, 4 stars).
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The 960-by-540 4.3-inch, PenTile LCD shade is a bit of a downer. The pixel arrangement creates colored lines demeanour subtly fuzzy. The Samsung Droid Charge‘s ($299, 4 stars) 800-by-480 Super AMOLED Plus shade looks crook and brighter, with more-saturated colors and blacker blacks. This shouldn’t be a deal-breaker, though; when regulating a Droid Bionic, a fuzziness usually worried me when we consciously suspicion about it.
The Motorola Droid Bionic is a CDMA EVDO phone with LTE. It isn’t a universe phone, yet it does work in a few dozen countries such as South Korea, China, and India where CDMA networks exist. The Bionic is a better voice phone than it puts on, since it dramatically under-reports a reception. At vigilance levels where a Droid Charge showed 3 bars, a Bionic showed dual or one. When a Charge showed one bar, a Bionic showed none. That’s with a same signal, mind you—it’s only a arrangement bars are calibrated differently.
Voice peculiarity was glorious in my tests. The earpiece is of normal volume and shows some exaggeration of shrill sounds; there’s a good volume of side-tone. Noise termination on effusive calls is excellent, with roughly no credentials sound entrance by on a other end. The speakerphone is intensely shrill if tinny; transmissions on a other side are also loud, yet muddy. The handset had no problem joining to several opposite Bluetooth headsets, and we could simply trigger voice dialing from Bluetooth. The phone had improved fitness noticing numbers than names when voice dialing, though.
The Droid Bionic has improved battery life than prior LTE phones like a HTC Thunderbolt, only since it has a vast 1735mAh battery. we got 3 hours of continual LTE streaming on a Bionic compared with 2.5 hours from a Thunderbolt’s 1400 mAh battery. I’d design about 12-14 hours of plain use, once again about 15 percent improved than a Thunderbolt. These phones are not power-sippers. Battery life can get most improved if we dump to 3G regulating a giveaway app to switch off LTE, though. we was means to fist an considerable 10 hours, 35 mins of speak time on 3G, one of a best formula we’ve ever seen on a CDMA phone.
Internet
LTE creates Web page bucket speeds, and other Internet-based applications, most faster than 3G. Verizon already covers 160 million Americans with LTE, and it’s announcing new cities each month. In my tests, Web pages installed some-more than twice as quick with LTE incited on. Streaming videos from Netflix cinema buffered most some-more quickly, and YouTube videos played in high peculiarity mode most some-more easily.
You can use a Bionic as a Wi-Fi hotspot for adult to 5 devices, and we was means to grasp glorious speeds of between 7-15Mbps down and 2-3Mbps up. You can multitask phone calls over 3G and information entrance over 4G, yet we was really unhappy to see that, distinct on a HTC Thunderbolt, we can’t run coexisting voice and information over 3G. That creates a Droid Bionic reduction constrained than a Thunderbolt for 3G-only users.
The flip side of LTE‘s pleasant palliate is that it becomes approach too easy to bust by Verizon’s capped information plans. In only 3 days of contrast with 30 mins of Netflix, 3 hours of audio streaming, one email account, some app downloads and some Web browsing, we ripped by 600MB. Unless you’re peaceful to trade LTE for Wi-Fi most of a time, we should demeanour into Verizon‘s 5GB, $50 information devise instead of a customary $30, 2GB bucket.
