Motorola Droid X Smartphone a Win for Android
It was surely only the purest coincidence that Verizon, Motorola and Google introduced the Droid X smartphone the day before Apple's iPhone 4 shipped. And certainly, the companies' ability to get actual shipping units into reviewers' hands before most of them could see Apple's latest had not a whiff of calculation. Perish the thought.
Fri, June 25, 2010
Computerworld — It was surely only the purest coincidence that Verizon (VZ), Motorola (MOT) and Google (GOOG) introduced the Droid X smartphone the day before Apple's iPhone 4 shipped. And certainly, the companies' ability to get actual shipping units into reviewers' hands before most of them could see Apple's (AAPL) latest had not a whiff of calculation. Perish the thought.
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That aside, the Droid X is one nice phone. It comes with a 1GHz processor and 512MB of memory. It's (comparatively) big: 5 in. long, 2.6 in. wide and 0.4 in. thick, roughly a quarter inch wider and half an inch longer than an iPhone. If you're used to iPhones, you will notice the larger size -- especially the width.
Of the phone's 5-in. length, 4.25 in. is glass, and the glass covers the entire width, most of which is display, except for about a quarter inch of casing on either side. The display is a WVGA 480 x 854-pixel screen -- I found it to be very clear and sharp.
The speaker is above the glass (of course) and the small menu, home, back and search buttons are below, above the mic pinhole.
Non-glass surfaces are rubberized, with a very comfortable and distinctive feel. Volume controls are on the right edge at the top, camera shutter below. The left edge has a mini-USB jack and a mini-HDMI jack. The power switch is at the top; the bottom is clean. There's 8GB of storage on board, and the phone comes with a 16GB microSD card.
To accommodate the dual LED flash and camera -- 8 megapixels with 720p video capture -- there's a sculpted quarter-inch bulge behind the earpiece. That sounds worse than it is, and it actually makes the phone easier to find in a crowded pocket or purse.
If you like physical keypads, you'll mourn the Droid X's move to a soft keyboard only. But softkey fans will enjoy the inclusion of the Swype input software, which lets you type quite quickly indeed without having to lift your finger from the keyboard.
The phone ships with Android 2.1; an over-the-air update to 2.2 and Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is promised for "late summer" (which probably means Labor Day). And if you are into social networking, you'll welcome the inclusion of the Motoblur suite of social networking tools, which make it trivial to tweet or Facebook or whatever.
