The Motorola Droid Bionic has a very compelling feature set and the battery life to let you enjoy it all. We fired up the Bionic at 7am and used it as our primary phone for calls, texting, internet, media capture and playback throughout the day until about 5pm with Bluetooth, WiFi and auto screen brightness enabled. We did this for a week and found a full charge could usually get us through the day with no special battery optimization settings. Of course, all batteries in all phones degrade over time but initially it’s a welcome and noticeable improvement over previous Motorola Droids with stock batteries. The Droid Bionic feels solid in the hand and the glass is tough. We like the size and weight better than previous Motorola Droids. We can easily say this is our favorite Moto Droid yet.
The video is improved with full 1080p HD but keep in mind the lens is still tiny and the video still has a toy quality to it. However, it’s better than previous Droids and will suffice when your “real” video camera is not handy. The camera still lags quite a bit and we miss the shutter button from the original Droid X which seems to be gone for good. The free “Retro Camera” app is better for taking pics than the bundled camera app.
We’d like to see Motorola improve the accelerometer in the Droid series. These phones seem to get confused to easily and display horizontal when vertical and vice versa. We’d also like to see a bit more volume from the speakers so we can crank up the ring tones when we need to. The phone seems to have a little more volume but our old LG Chocolate Flip has a much louder ringer. Again, not that big a deal but sometimes in louder environments or crowds it’s handy to be able to crank it up.
Overall, we really like the Motorola Droid. Feels good, looks good, great call quality, easy to use, 1080p video, tough glass, solid OS, the Droid Marketplace and most importantly good battery life to actually let you enjoy all the features of the phone. This phone should do well for Moto and Verizon.
This is a brief clip we shot with the Droid Bionic when we stumbled on the Tesla interactive showroom at Santana Row in Silicon Valley.
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