Motorola Droid X has been on the radar for tech industry sky watchers for a long time now. It has been a secret so badly kept that we actually knew everything about it way before it was released. We even had hands-on videos of it before it became officially available for such things. Nevertheless, it is finally official and is here for everyone to bask in its newfound speed and extra-large display size. Not to mention quite a few other great features. Motorola seems to be on the right track with the whole Droid series, even though the ‘Droid Does’ campaign is getting a bit tired. Some campaigns are just not meant to run for three successive generations of a product. So excluding that, I’d say the new Droid is going to be a tough player in the higher echelons of the smartphone market.
After the release earlier this week, the Motorola Droid X has received good early reviews from all quarters. First impressions are hence pretty good. It is definitely a looker of a phone and that screen simply seals the deal. The phone is a lot thinner than the original Droid, thanks to the lack of a slide out keyboard. Motorola has perhaps finally taken confidence in the fact that modern smartphones users no longer care to have a physical keyboard. They are usually not in the second decade of their lives and do not make it a habit of getting Carpal Tunnel Syndrome from excessive texting.
Also, touchscreens have come a long way since the mono-touch capable resistive touchscreens. Modern capacitive touchscreens have really come of age and are okay for most light typing jobs. Plus, the Droid X’s main competition — the iPhone 4 and the HTC EVO 4G — are pretty sleek ones themselves. So fattening up the new Droid would’ve been a very bad idea.
Matching both the latest iPhone and the HTC EVO, the Droid X has a 1GHz mobile CPU. Just like the original Droid, Motorola has used a Texas Instruments OMAP CPU for the Droid X. It has the new TI OMAP 3630 processor chugging away at the heart of it all. It is a marked improvement over the OMAP 3430 used in the first Droid. TI has gone in to a 45 nanometer manufacturing process in order to drastically increase the performance on the OMAP 3630. Thanks to the new fabrication process, the chip gives a performance boost of about 80% over the earlier chip. This performance improvement is true for both the regular processing and the graphics. TI has emphasized that this new chip is going to make the web browsing experience on the Droid X a lot better than the original Droid (which was already pretty good) thanks to better handling of graphics heavy sites and or course the faster processing. Keeping the processor company is 512MB of RAM, which makes sure that this phone makes it through demanding applications that would possibly crash or freeze up other phones.
TI has not only contributed to the faster processing and better graphics, they have also contributed with a great wireless networking chip. This chips allows the Droid X to act as a mobile WiFi hotspot — a feature that has suddenly come into the attention of the public after the Verizon MiFi’s success in the US and elsewhere and especially after the recent Android 2.2 (FroYo) announcement at the Google I/O where it was a joyous for Android users and fans.
The Droid X will be able to connect to up to 5 devices simultaneously over WiFi and share its mobile broadband connection with all of them. This is also a primary selling point o the HTC EVO 4G and a conspicuously missing feature on the iPhone 4 (definitely an AT&T problem). The EVO has an edge here over the Droid X because it is a 4G phone on Verizon’s new 4G CDMA network.
The actual graphics chip on the Droid X is a PowerVR SGX530 from Imagination Technologies. This is something that just might steal the show when it comes to those Android games that we’ve been waiting for. The iPhone and the iPod Touch seriously steals the show when it comes to games, thanks to the great titles available on the App Store. But now that the Android gaming market is picking up, a phone like this might gain serious traction through it.
All games and multimedia content is bound to look great on the Droid X’s extra-large 4.3 inch screen. Even though it has tough competition form the Retina Display on the iPhone 4, we have seen that it looks pretty much the same at the normal viewing distance when pitted against other displays with an average PPI (Pixel Per Inch) density. The native resolution on the Droid X’s display is 854×480 (WVGA). It can display HD videos of up to 720p resolution but playback 1080p HD videos (30FPS max for both). This is important because this is one of the few phones in the market that has an inbuilt HDMI out onboard to connect to HDTV’s. It also has a fast USB 2.0 port and DLNA support! The possible applications of these features in merging of home theatre rigs with mobile gaming and online entertainment are pretty exciting.
The camera on this phone is rated at 8.0 megapixel and sports auto-focus and dual LED-flash. Here, the Droid X might be outdone by the iPhone 4. Mainly because it has been outdoing everybody else ever since it came out. The backlit sensor on the new iPhone is really making its presence felt through really great photos. But the Dorid X might win over thanks to the Android (openness) factor and the 8 megapixel count. It can also capture video at 720p although its sensor probably does not resolve all those pixels in reality. But you are still likely to get decent footage out of it.
The Droid X will sadly be running Android 2.1 when it comes out on July 15th. Android 2.2 on Droid X is on the cards apparently and it should be, really. It is fully capable of handling the full load of FroYo and probably beyond. Besides, the new speed enhanced compiler in FroYo with the speedy OMAP 3630 should combine to a super fast user experience.
The UI is apparently neither MOTOBLUR nor NinjaBlur. It has the familiar MOTOBLUR looks with slightly different animations and the same apps. It is possible that Verizon has asked them to keep the MOTOBLUR branding away even though they wanted the UI. Might be an attempt at exclusivity or just a decision made by the marketing department.
The Droid X also has the usual bagful of features — GPS (eGPS and sGPS), Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, accelerometer and more. It has a large 8GB onboard storage and a 16GB memory card comes bundled with it as a standard. It supports expansion up to 32GB so the total storage limit is 40GB on papers.
Over all, it looks like Verizon’s line up is getting all set to take on AT&T and the iPhone 4. The Droid X looks like a really great Android phone and will be a serious competition for all high-end smartphones that are in the market and coming up later.
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