Tech, Life and Everyday Living
Motorola Droid RAZR Review The past month I’ve had the chance to fully test the Motorola Droid RAZR. This phone is big and thin, and it’s very nice looking. I do have to say that it’s a much better phone than the Bionic, so...
Droid Bionic Review
I recently had a few weeks with the Droid Bionic and some accessories. In the spirit of full disclosure after about 4 days with the first Bionic, the device went dead because of the battery, and after...
Apple's Let's talk iPhone Announcement Apple has it’s iPhone event tomorrow. It says Let’s talk iPhone, but we all expect them to announce iOS 5 and iCloud, as well as a new iPhone of some kind.
The Times to start listening and following...
Droid Charge Review The Droid Charge by Samsung, is a decent Android phone, but it's very underpowered and outdated as far as the Android software.
It has a 4.3-inch, 800x480 display, but inside it only packs a single...
The past month I’ve had the chance to fully test the Motorola Droid RAZR. This phone is big and thin, and it’s very nice looking. I do have to say that it’s a much better phone than the Bionic, so if you have a Bionic, I’m sorry.
The phone itself is a mix of aluminum, Kevlar and Gorilla Glass. However, it may seem tough, but the back of the phone is quite slick, so I was always afraid of dropping it, and it seemed like it was just a tad too big to feel comfortable in the hand.
I recently had a few weeks with the Droid Bionic and some accessories. In the spirit of full disclosure after about 4 days with the first Bionic, the device went dead because of the battery, and after a full night on the charger it wouldn’t wake up, it was totally dead. I browsed all sorts of forums and googled the issue, but no one seems to know what exactly happened. I received my second unit, and it has worked flawlessly ever since.
That being said, let’s get into the review. As usual, I’ll start with the hardware specs of the device. It packs a 1 GHz Dual core Cortex-A9, it’s got 1 GB of memory, 16 GB of storage with an included 16GB microSD card. It’s also got an 8 MP camera with LED flash and full 1080p video recording with a front facing VGA camera. It also has Verizon 4G LTE as well as wifi and the usual suspects of GPS, etc. It also does come with the latest version of Android which is Gingerbread.
One of the biggest gripes I have with this phone, even though it’s got 16GB of internal memory, roughly have of it is loaded with software you cannot delete, such as Citrix GoToMeeting, Quickoffice, VCast Music, Verizon Media Manager and Verizon Back Up Assistant, Blockbuster, MOTOPRINT, Let’s Golf 2, Zumocast and others. I can see how some people might want these, but I truly wish the carriers and manufacturers would let the consumers decide and offer them as an optional download.
The Droid Charge by Samsung, is a decent Android phone, but it’s very underpowered and outdated as far as the Android software.
It has a 4.3-inch, 800×480 display, but inside it only packs a single core processor. It does seem to be somewhat responsive, but I had to kill tasks quite a bit, and it seemed to need a reboot more than any other phone I’ve used. It comes packed with GPS, WiFi and a Verizon 4G LTE radio.
If you rely on GPS and location based services, it was very slow to get my location and gather the information.
The good thing about it is the LTE service. I was very impressed by the speed, I was consistently getting 12-15 Mbps down and between 2.5-4 up.
Hardware
It comes packed with a Tegra 2 1GHz dual core processor, sports a 1280×800 touch screen, with built in WiFi, and a 4G LTE radio. It comes with Android Honeycomb 3.1, and is a fairly fast device.
This tablet was the closest in design to the iPad 2, and it felt good to hold it, it wasn’t very heavy, and it was easy to carry around for a long time.
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I recently had time to look at the HTC Trophy, Verizion’s first Windows Phone 7 device. Let’s dive in:
If you’re looking for the fastest phone, then this probably isn’t for you, but it does come with a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, it sports a 3.8-inch capacitive touch screen, 802.11n Wifi, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR, GPS, FM Radio. It also comes with 8 GB of fixed flash storage with 512MB ROM, and 576MB of RAM. It also has a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, and is able to take video in 720p. The bad thing is no front facing camera.
The phone is small, and it was easy to hold and use, and felt natural in the hand. The battery was good, as I could get a good 24 hours of usage out of it, and with minimal usage I could get a couple days usage.
I really liked this phone, and all in all for the people who are afraid of smartphones, this is one of the best for a beginner.
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The Tab has a 7-inch form factor, and it feels pretty good in one hand, it doesn’t have a Super AMOLED screen like the Galaxy based smartphones, but it does have a 1024 x 600 resolution LCD that looks really good, and has great viewing angles (i.e. the color doesn’t distort when you tilt the screen). It’s also fairly responsive, although more than a few times I had to tap on something more than once to get it to launch, which was somewhat frustrating. It packs a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor, and has 512MB RAM, 2GB built-in storage and a 16GB microSD.
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One of the newest additions to the Android lineup is the Droid Pro. It’s a candy bar style android phone with the keyboard on the front, so there is no flipping or sliding necessary.
The phone is a nice size, it’s 2.5″ wide, 5″ tall and about 1/2″ thin, so it’s very comparable to most smart phones. It feels ok in the hand, but just a little tall, there are 3 physical buttons on the side of the phone, a volume rocker, the power and a button on the right side that is preset to go to the calendar application, but you can change it to whatever you want, the headphone jack is on the top center, which I didn’t like because when I put it in the newest Griffin car dock, I couldn’t use an aux cable with it. The screen is is a 3.1-inch TFT LCD touchscreen, and it was very usable in all conditions.
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I have to say to day to date the Droid X is one of the best Android phones out there, and first off the specs:
It’s got a 4.3-inch 854×480 screen, 1GHz OMAP processor, 512MB RAM, 24GB storage, 8-mega-pixel stills, 720p HD video, DLNA w/HDMI Micro out, three mics for noise cancellation and wireless N with 3G hot spot capability. It’s powerful, and it’s got a good design, but there’s more to the story.
Category : Featured, Phones, Reviews, Web/Tech, Work, Life, etc.
I had time to look at the Kin One and Two over the past couple weeks, and I have to say, Microsoft really knows how to screw up a phone. It’s not quite a smartphone, but it’s also a little more than a regular phone, as it ties into the major social networks, has no app store, and they still charge you for a smartphone plan.
That being said, I got used to not being able to do anything but look at and update my status on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Windows Live, but that’s about all you can do, besides email.
