Showing posts with label droid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label droid. Show all posts
Netflix updates Android app, expands device support
Droid Incredible 2 review
TAGS
adreno 205,
Android,
DLNA,
droid,
froyo,
Google,
HTC,
Incredible,
Incredible 2,
Incredible S,
Kindle,
MDM9600,
MSM8655,
qualcomm,
Review,
skype,
Snapdragon,
Verizon,
VZW,
Wireless
0
comments
Droid Incredible 2 review
Hardware
There's no doubt that the Incredible 2 is an extremely handsome, if not sightly austere looking handset. It's much like the interior of a late 20th century BMW -- all class, all business, and all black. Compared to the original, it's slicker and softer, with rounder edges and much better build quality thanks mostly to the ultra-rigid machined and anodized black aluminum screen bezel. Gone are the old model's whimsical red accents, red innards, and red battery. Instead you'll find a translucent black chassis and a black battery under the hood. Even the bevel around the earpiece is finished in black. Yes, this is Darth Vader's phone, the Droid he's been looking for. The back cover features the same grippy soft-touch finish and unique layered motif as the Incredible, but instead of two "steps", there's only one this time around. Like the HTC ThunderBolt, the Incredible 2 includes contacts (missing from the Incredible S) for an optional inductive charging back, and integrates some of its antennae into the battery door. Pop the cover, and there's a Verizon / Vodafone SIM under the 1450mAh battery plus a 16GB microSD card pre-installed.
The 4-inch WVGA Super LCD display deserves a special mention. It's one of the best LCD-based panels we've come across -- bright without any leaks or spots, with naturally saturated colors, deep ink-like blacks, and superb viewing angles. Other than pixel density, it gives the iPhone 4's IPS screen a run for its money and even warrants a nod or two from the notoriously smug Super AMOLED crowd. We've mentioned the trick capacitive buttons before, which rotate when the handset switches between portrait and landscape for apps that support both display modes. It turns out the buttons are drawn by groups of tiny LEDs which are turned on and off based on orientation.
Battery life is excellent for an Android smartphone. Starting from a full charge, the Incredible 2 managed 36 hours and 40 minutes of up time before we decided to plug it back in with 7% battery life remaining. That was mostly light use -- reading email (3 accounts), checking Twitter, and occasionally replying or posting -- with all the radios (except Bluetooth) turned on. Still, this included 30 minutes spent with the handset strutting its stuff in front of the camera for our video review, 20 minutes being used as a hotspot, taking / uploading a few full-size pictures, and only 6 hours idling while we slept.
Camera
The camera on the original Incredible was no slouch. It could be coaxed into taking fantastic shots given enough care and attention. The Incredible 2 takes this formula to the next level, with a camera that's capable of producing amazingly realistic pictures without too much effort. It features HTC's next generation 8 megapixel sensor with autofocus optics (also found on the Thunderbolt) plus a dual-LED flash. Color balance and exposure are top notch. Low-light performance is impressive. Noise is kept under control without compromising detail. In fact, we're pretty sure we're dealing with a backside-illuminated sensor here. There's a certain clinical precision to the pictures captured with the Incredible 2 that we've really come to appreciate -- the camera simply gathers a tremendous amount of information, resulting in amazing shots.
Droid Incredible 2 sample shots
The Incredible 2 captures 720p (HD) video at 30fps with decent results. While it performs significantly better than its predecessor, video recording isn't as stellar as photography. The frame rate isn't quite as smooth as with some other devices (the iPhone 4 comes to mind), and sound quality leaves room for improvement. The camera interface offers a plethora of settings: there's touch-to-focus (for both stills and video), flash mode, Photo Booth-like effects, and additional options nestled within the menus (such as timer, exposure, while-balance, resolution, ISO, and face detection). The digital zoom is activated by pressing the volume rocker or by using an on-screen slider. Unfortunately, there's no dedicated 2-stage camera button, no panorama mode, and the 4-inch Super LCD display, while gorgeous, tends to wash out in direct sunlight, making it difficult to properly frame shots.
Software
While the Incredible 2's hardware is supremely refined, things are bittersweet on the software front. It's running Sense, which we've reviewed in detail alongside the Incredible S. We appreciate that it brings a polished, friendly, and consistent user experience across HTC's multitude of devices, and also provides the company with a strong brand identity, but we're just not fans. The problem is that with each revision of Sense we feel more alienated from what we came looking for in the first place, namely Android. Sense is starting to look and feel like its own OS -- Android in a parallel universe -- with almost every aspect of the user interface getting customized, and deviating significantly from the Android way. Certain changes are positive, like the cool time / weather widget, the fast boot feature, and the much improved music player. Others are frustrating, like the the convoluted dialer / call log and the poor keyboard layout (who decided to put the hide button just below the shift key?!) We realize that it's all a matter of taste, and that some people will choose to go down the rabbit hole into Sense wonderland, but we're purists. So HTC, give us a way to disable Sense, and all will be forgiven. Oh, and third-party launchers and keyboards don't count - like most people, we don't have the time or interest to customize our phones beyond installing a few apps.
The most glaring issue we have with the Incredible 2 is the criminal amount of crapware that Verizon decided to pre-load on the handset -- apps that can't be removed and will forever litter the app tray. Some of them, like Adobe Reader, Kindle, Quickoffice (basic version), Skype, and Slacker are apps you'd likely want to install anyway. Others, such as Blockbuster (a shortcut to the Market), Let's Golf 2, NFL Mobile, and NSF Shift don't have the same widespread appeal, but are passable. But it's with apps like City ID, My Verizon Mobile, V CAST Apps, V CAST Media, V CAST Music, V CAST Tones, V CAST Videos, and VZ Navigator that things become downright ludicrous. Apparently Verizon wants to lump its sexy flagship 3G Android smartphone together with its generic dumbphones by contaminating it with utterly meaningless carrier-branded apps and services. We can only hope that a few heads will roll in Verizon's marketing department after we publish this review, and that common sense prevails with a Gingerbread update that allows us to uninstall the offending apps.
Wrap up
Droid 3 details leaked: dual-core processor, 4-inch qHD screen, no LTE?
TechnoBuffalo
Product portal, tweets suggest 'Thrive' moniker for Toshiba's Honeycomb tablet
Stream Hulu on your Nook Color, ditch Fitzgerald for Family Guy
TAGS
Android,
barnes noble,
bn,
color,
droid,
droid incredible,
e book,
e books,
e reader,
e readers,
epic,
epic 4g,
Google,
HTC,
htc thunderbolt,
hulu,
nook,
nook color,
tablet
0
comments
Game Gripper review
Game Gripper
The Gripper is a simple rubber thing that just slides on over the keypad. It's been more or less hand made, that much is easy to tell, but it feels durable and its size plus flexibility means it'd be comfortable enough to stick in a pocket or can be tossed into a bag without breaking. Our initial fears that the buttons would have horrible feel turned out to be unwarranted, as they actually have a decent tactility to them. It's nothing like the feel of a standard gamepad, but it's not necessarily bad.
We played a number of games for a number of hours and about the only complaint we have is that the Gripper has a tendency to slide left-to-right a bit when you're frantically tapping in games like Street Fighter 2. But, that could be seen as a good thing, as the unit comes with a rather scary warning that pushing too hard could potentially damage your phone's keyboard. Perhaps we're being a bit optimistic, but that sliding does let you know when you're getting a bit too forceful. Regardless, it rarely slid so much as to cause us to hit the wrong buttons.
After those hours of play we never noticed any change in feel on the keys being pressed, nor any marks on them or any other sign of damage, so we're reasonably sure you can load up those emulators to your heart's desire and get your game on without fear of permanent damage -- if you can rein in that super-human finger strength you've been developing all these years.
Wrap-up
For $15 the Game Gripper turns a Droid (or Milestone) into a far more capable gaming machine and, while we do wish there were some way to add shoulder buttons to the thing, we were actually able to map the camera and volume up buttons to be R and L, respectively, giving a reasonable facsimile for an SNES controller. The feel isn't perfect, but we're satisfied, and after a few days with one we certainly don't want to game without it.
Oh, and if you happen to be playing on some other device, you'll be happy to know that there's a Gripper coming for the Devour, Backflip, and the N900 too.
Droid Charge review
Samsung Droid Charge
Hardware
The Droid Charge is definitely a bit of a handful, as you'd expect with its 4.3-inch, 800 x 480 display. Still, we wouldn't call it a big phone by today's standards. It's .46-inches (12mm) at its thinnest, though it swells slightly in a little flare at the bottom (out to about 14mm). That's in the same ballpark of the recently-released Thunderbolt, which we're thinking many people will cross-shop this with. The Thunderbolt comes in at about .52-inches (13mm) thick, but the taper and profile on the Charge makes it seem thinner.
It's considerably lighter, too, 5.04oz (143g) versus 6.23oz (177g), though that relative lightness comes at a cost: a somewhat plasticy build. It certainly doesn't feel as bad as that Samsung flip-phone you had back in 2002, the one you rocked until your dog got ahold of it, but compared to the metal and unibody offerings seen elsewhere the Charge lacks any feeling of prestige in the hand.
It doesn't feel bad; there's a comfortable taper about it, a little bulge at the bottom that shifts the center of balance of the phone downward toward the center of your palm when holding it. It's quite comfortable to hold, helped by the smooth, glossy back that, sadly, seems a bit prone to scratches. There's a small grille on the back. Throw the phone in speakerphone mode and the voices of whoever you're speaking with come through loud and clear -- stress on the loud bit. Overall call quality and audio quality was good.
When in the hand, screen forward, power button on the right side and the volume rocker on the left fall to fingers quite readily. But, and here's something of a shocker, those aren't the only physical inputs here. On the phone's chin, which is designed with a hint of a pointy goatee, you'll find four honest-to-gosh buttons. Touch them and they actually depress! Some might call this a dated throwback to the olden days of cellular telephony, others will quite appreciate their presence. We like them, though we do wish they lit up a bit brighter.
Display
The buttons may be a bit dim, but there are no issues with brightness on that display, which again is 4.3-inches of Super AMOLED Plus goodness. Resolution is not jaw-dropping at 800 x 480, though the contrast is. Blacks are, naturally, perfectly black and the brights are borderline blinding in a darkened room, while viewing angles are unlimited. Even outdoors in the screen is quite readable. We had no problem composing shots when the sun finally broke through the clouds and lit up our weekend.
However, color reproduction can leave a bit to be desired. On the default, automatic-brightness settings, white sections of the display instead fall toward green. Remove that toggle, dial up the brightness and you get far more pure shades -- just make sure you squint a little before popping on the display in a dimly-lit area. The color-tweaking feature found on the Galaxy S II? Sadly not here, though the display is still mighty impressive even without.
Performance and battery life
The Charge is sadly not a member of the dual-core militia, but despite its 1GHz Hummingbird internals we found it to be quite responsive. You know, snappy. It won't blow your mind with ridiculous benchmark scores but, more importantly, it never left us waiting. In fact benchmark scores were something of a mixed bag, leaving us unconvinced that they're correctly reflecting the performance of the phone. Quadrant delivered scores around 1,000 and Linpack 13.8 MFLOPS -- on the poor side. Neocore, meanwhile, managed 56.8fps and Nenamark 45fps, while the Sunspider Javascript benchmark completed in a respectable 6,194ms. Again, most importantly the phone feels quick to use -- it's no Atrix, but it's certainly on par with the Thunderbolt.
When it comes to battery life, there's no competition. The Charge blitzed through a full day of what we'd consider typical use, coming off the charger at about 9am and not getting slotted back in again until 9pm the next night. Yes, you read that right, two working days of what we'd consider average use with GPS and WiFi on, taking pictures and videos, all powered by a single 1,600mAh battery. Granted, we weren't running our performance benchmarks at the time, but we were hammering the LTE antenna to get some speed results.
And what results they were! On LTE we managed a maximum download of 15.1Mbps down and 3.9Mbps up, enough to shame your average cable modem. And those with lots of friends (or lots of tablets) can share that connection with up to 10 devices.
Oh, and in case you're still worried about the GPS performance of your Sammy handset, fear not. The Charge didn't exactly impress us with its geolocation abilities, occasionally struggling to find a lock when in an occluded area, say on a porch or inside near a window. However, once in the clear it found enough orbiting birds in the sky quickly and accurately.
Software
The Charge comes with Android 2.2 Froyo installed and, yes, that's a bit of a disappointment in these days of Gingerbread, but the light customizations applied here by Samsung help to keep it looking somewhat fresh. The phone's lock screen has you dragging a puzzle piece to get access to the main OS, though missed calls and other events will pop up here and, if you put them in their place, you'll be taken right to whatever event caused them to appear in the first place.
A healthy seven home screens are on offer, and pinching on any of them zooms you out to see them all from high, high above. By default the middle one is your go-to screen, but you can choose any of them to take that place. Samsung adds a few custom widgets to the mix, but nothing too mind-blowing, like a dual-clock that will tell you what time it is at home and afar, plus a task manager widget that's handy if you think you're better at memory cleaning than Android.
The cool accelerometer-augmented gestures for zooming and moving on the Galaxy S II are sadly not here, however there are a number of inclusions here that are rather less wanted -- a huge amount of icons for bloatware and game demos that cannot be removed. They're not exactly filling the phone to capacity, but having three full pages of apps on your phone the first time you boot it up seems a bit excessive.
Camera
Out through a little chrome highlight on the back of the phone peers what we believe is the same eight megapixel sensor that earlier impressed us on the Galaxy S II. It impresses us here, too, capturing bright, clear images even when lighting conditions are less than optimal. Tap-to-focus quite naturally works, but we were pleasantly surprised to find that the camera used auto-focus when capturing video.
The payback is a little bit of focus noise injected into your footage, a sort of tapping you can hear in the sample above, but we didn't find it to be too obtrusive. However, the auto-focus is a bit slow, so we still preferred manually focusing by tapping. Video quality is again quite good, not quite the 1080p stuff that the Galaxy S II can deliver, but there's only so much you can do with a single core processor.
Samsung Droid Charge sample images
Wrap-up
The Droid Charge is a total sleeper. We'll be perfectly honest that we weren't expecting to be wowed but, well, we're certainly impressed. In terms of performance it's more or less on par with the recently-released Thunderbolt, but battery life is far superior and, while the Super AMOLED Plus display has its quirks, we think they just add character. The imaging sensor 'round the back is top-notch and, overall, this is a very good phone. The only real disappointment? A plastic design that probably will be looking a bit rough after a few months in your pocket.
And then there's the cost: $300 on-contract puts the 32GB Charge in an unfortunate tie for the position of Verizon's most expensive smartphone. That tie is, of course, with Apple's 32GB iPhone 4. That's $50 more than the Thunderbolt, which also comes with the same number of gee bees. Worth the extra? Given the battery life and display improvements here, we'd be inclined to say yes.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
