Motorola

Motorola

Motorola’s Droid series of smartphones is now firmly established in the market, even though the original Droid was launched as recently as October 2009. Now there is a new Droid, the Bionic, which is scheduled for release around Spring 2011.

In a marketplace dominated by the Apple iPhone and BlackBerry, the Droid was Motorola’s bid to drag itself from the doldrums. Having been associated for too long with competent but boring, business oriented phones, Motorola took a new approach. To compete with Apple it had to create an iconic, memorable brand of its own, and to a degree it has succeeded with the Droid series.

The new Droid Bionic, like its predecessors in the series, runs Google’s Android operating system, which is quickly becoming the hottest competitor for Apple and Research in Motion (BlackBerry). Fitted as standard is version 2.2 of Android, although one would assume that users can upgrade the OS as and when necessary. The phone has a dual-core 1 GHz speed Nvidia Tegra CPU (making the overall processor speed 2 GHz), 512 MB of RAM, plus up to 32 GB of user data storage on Micro SD card.

As with all the Droid series, this phone features a large, crystal clear multi touchscreen, in this case 4.3 inches in size, capacitive, with a display resolution of 960×540 pixels. As is increasingly the trend with Android phones, the Droid Bionic does not provide the user with a physical keyboard. Instead, text and other user input is handled by means of a virtual keyboard on the unit’s large touchscreen. This is something that still divides users, with those who do a lot of texting and emailing in many cases swearing they prefer something like a BlackBerry with its real keyboard. On the other hand, many people who go over to a touchscreen report that they soon get used to the new method.

The Droid Bionic also features an 8 megapixels still and video camera that incorporates flash and auto-focus. The resolution of the captured video is 1280×720 pixels. In addition to its main camera, the Droid Bionic has a second webcam type camera, which means that video calling is a straightforward option once users have installed a suitable video telephony application such as Skype.

Where the Bionic really scores, and represents a big jump forward from previous models, is in its enhanced connectivity. Those who purchase the phone on the Verizon network will be able to take advantage of the new 4G LTE service. This new network offers download and upload speeds of around five times those possible on 3G, which will make for a much more satisfying user experience when downloading or uploading large media files. To be fair, the 4G LTE service is currently only available in a fairly small number of city and airport locations in the US, but it is being rapidly expanded and clearly it is the future. As such, the Bionic is well placed to take advantage of it.