Motorola DROID 4 Review

Roughly two years ago, the Motorola DROID successfully revolutionized the Android brand with its once-powerful spec sheet, massive brand marketing campaign, and vanilla Android interface. Three droids later, Motorola’s fourth DROID builds off of the brand’s past successes and failures. This famous QWERTY Android is back with vengeance under the “DROID 4″ name on Verizon. Is Motorola’s DROID 4 the ultimate QWERTY-equipped smartphone? Read the full BriefMobile review after the break to find out.

• 4-inch TFT LCD display
• qHD resolution (540 x 960)
• 1.2 GHz dual-core processor
• Texas Instruments OMAP4460
• 1 GB RAM
• 8-megapixel camera
• 1080p video recording
• 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera
• 720p HD video recording
• LED flash
• Auto-focus
• Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread
• 16 GB internal storage
• 1785 mAh battery
• Talk: 750 minutes
• Standby: 205 hours

Motorola’s Droid 4 continues the company’s newfound love affair with sharply angled and curved device chassis. It’s almost Droid RAZR-esque in terms of body shape. Manufactured with a strong polycarbonate base, slight faux-metal highlights, and a silicon grippable backside, the Droid 4 feels fairly well built. There is a little bit of wiggle room due to the QWERTY slider and battery casing, ut the phone is much more solid than other Android devices on the market.

Up front, the DROID 4′s all business with plate glass  covering the display, front-facing camera, sensors, and capacitive buttons down below. There’s a fairly thin bezel on the left and right sides of the device, but the top and bottom bezels are lengthy. At 69.9 millimeters tall, the device is actually taller (lengthier from top to bottom) than the already-tall Samsung Galaxy Nexus. The main benefit of this height can be seen in the increased keyboard space.

The back of the DROID 4 is dominated by a silicon grip casing that acts as a removable cover for the battery pack. Above the back cover, a small-sized 8-megpixel lens sits next to an LED flash module and noise-cancelling microphone. The device’s main speaker is located in the lower left corner on the back of the phone. Its location is not necessarily optimal, because of the natural finger position while the keyboard is open. You can, in fact, block the speaker while holding the device with your right hand.

Up top, the device’s power button is just a tiny slit with chrome paint. It can be difficult to find and press due to its smaller recess from the device. As far as buttons go, the power button was less clicky than we’d like. As a result, the DROID 4 doesn’t allow for fast “turn on” motions.

The right side of the device’s volume toggle is the same way. It’s only slightly set apart from the side of the device, and there’s less give than we’d hoped. On the left side, a port tray includes the microUSB receptor and mini HDMI port.

Overall, Motorola’s edgy, sexy, modern style for the DROID 4 pays off. Although it could be thinner and it’s a bit plain, the DROID 4 looks and feels like a next-gen smartphone.

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Motorola’s DROID brand used to center around its keyboard-equipped line of DROID phones. This device continues the keyboard legacy with its expanded five-row key set and perfected buttons. Buttons retain the soft clickiness seen on past DROIDs. But, this time they’re slightly more raised and separated by a grid. The keys are offset like a traditional keyboard, and the number pad includes a variety of shortcuts for symbols familiar on a computer keyboard. There is an arrow pad in the bottom right corner.

Typing on the DROID 4 was a delight. With the stand-out, well-separated keys, the DROID 4 makes text messaging and emailing much easier. Thanks to the snappy OMAP processor, the device can quickly transition from portrait mode to landscape mode when the keyboard is pulled out. Messaging in the dark is no longer a problem, because the edge-lit keyboard provides backlighted labels for each of the keys. Overall, I believe without a doubt that the DROID 4 has one of the best QWERTY keyboards on the market.

Motorola’s placed a 4-inch TFT LCD screen on the DROID 4 that feels like a mixed bag of pluses and minuses. The display resolution is 540 x 960 pixels, giving it a pixels-per-inch ratio of ~276. That bests Samsung’s Galaxy S II, but falls behind the HTC Rezound or Samsung Galaxy Nexus. The qHD resolution and pixel density offers an expansive reading area for emails and web browsing, easily beating out the smaller viewport on the WVGA Galaxy S II.

Brightness-wise, Motorola’s DROID 4 was on par with other industry leaders. Outdoors, text and pictures are visible enough. But, in terms of color quality, the DROID 4 was far behind its AMOLED-packing competition. Colors were washed out virtually everywhere on the device. Whites were creamy, and blacks were gray-ish. The contrast levels are simply too low, and viewing angles are not as good as those on the Galaxy Nexus or Droid RAZR.

Pixelation is easy to see, despite the higher pixel density. Gradients often looked choppy on the DROID 4, with pixelated blocks dominating the color transitions.

The DROID 4, like most of last year’s higher-end smartphones runs Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread. We’re disappointed to see Motorola launching a brand new device with an outdated operating system version, but we understand that an Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) upgrade will take time to reach the device. The version of Gingerbread present on this new DROID is covered in a complete and thorough Motorola Blur skin. The skin adds a few new features, a different launcher, and themes the device with a white and navy finish.

Motorola’s essentially revamped the traditional green, black, and yellow Gingerbread theme, bringing in a navy, teal, and white-ish gray color scheme. Menus that were previously black now utilize gray backgrounds and colored icons. Headers and titles are surrounded by navy blue… the status bar is the same. Overall, the Blur theme lacks polish and style, looking more like a cartoon interface. The color choices are less universal, and brightly colored icons clash with the blue elements of the theme. Unfortunately, Motorola’s entire theme effort is undermined by the overpowering amount of animation they’ve added to every single piece of the interface. Home screens roll around on a flippy carousel, applications fade and zoom in or out, the application drawer slowly zooms into view, and moving around applications enters a wiggly “no gravity” animation zone. It’s simply impossible to escape some of the more hideous animations on this device unless you replace the Blur Launcher.

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We’ve reviewed this same version of the Blur launcher times before with the Droid RAZR, Droid Bionic, and Photon 4G. It’s completely different, and more feature-packed, than the stock Gingerbread launcher. This Blur version includes a customizable four icon dock at the bottom of the display. Its application drawer slides horizontally and includes an intuitive and organized grouping feature. Widgets, shortcuts, wallpapers, and folders are handled from the traditional dialog menu in Gingerbread, although we found this one to be particularly slow loading. The shortcut list may take up to five seconds to appear, which can be annoying.

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Widgets under the latest version of Blur on the DROID 4 are both scrollable and resizable on the default Blur launcher. Personally, I detest the Blur-themed widgets in terms of appearance. But, their functionality is indisputable. Included widgets are: analog clock, bookmarks, calendar, date and time, email, favorite contacts, My Gallery, My Music, news reader, social networking, social status updater, sticky notes, tasks, power toggles, weather, and world clock. As you can see, there are plenty of pre-loaded widget choices. Most of them are quite useful despite their lackluster appearance.

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The camera application on Motorola’s Blur skin hasn;’t changed much since its introduction with the DROID 3. It’s got a plethora of options including some coloring effects, focus options, and shot modes. Users can also control the brightness, flash, and zoom levels. Of course, there’s also a built-in panorama creator for those big landscape scenes. Photos snap fairly quickly with only a minor pause in between. The shutter lag is certainly not as low as the Galaxy Nexus, but it beats out past Motorola and HTC phones by a long shot.

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Motorola’s phone application also stayed unchanged over the past few builds of Blur-Gingerbread. I still love the alphanumeric phone number recognition built into the T9 dialer. It makes it easy to find friends’ numbers without searching through a loaded contact book. Of course, the recent calls, contacts, and favorite contacts menus are built in to the phone interface.

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The clock application on Motorola Blur phones is among the best out there. It’s a simplistic alarm plus timer combination that satisfies most of my needs. The alarm clock includes options for increasing volume alarms, and the timer works well for cooking and other day-to-day chores.

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Motorola’s picture gallery remains one of the best examples of a simple application overloaded and brought down with complexities. Moto tried too hard to cram cloud storage, backup, and online photo sharing features into the application, neglecting the actual photo viewing experience. Pictures are spilled out on a virtual table and navigation is a nightmare. To see the standard camera roll, it takes an extra click of the screen. Multi-touch zooming was choppy and laggy at best while browsing photos.

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There are two included music applications on the DROID 4. The first is Google’s brand new Music application. The second a “My Music” application from Motorola that allows for sharing, song recommendations, artist news and photos, concert finders, and more. It’s plugged in to Motorola’s cloud storage MotoCast system. Like the gallery application, Motorola’s music app is hunkered down by these extra features and fails to get back to the basics of music playing. Google’s Music application is a much better fit for the average listener.

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A default news and RSS reader comes on the device with support for custom RSS feeds as well as a number of standard corporate feeds. The reading interface is far too basic, leaving out many of the cool features one comes to expect with products like Google Reader. However, it does have a nice little widget for RSS ticking.

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The Social Networking hub allows users to integrate their Facebook, Flickr, LastFM, LinkedIn, Photobucket, Picasa, Twitter, and YouTube accounts in one spot. It transforms all of the data from these accounts into a single news feed and supports basic reply-to structures for Facebook and Twitter. I still prefer using the actual applications for each individual website. But, it’s a nice way to scroll through your friends’ status updates in an easy-clean manner.

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As many Motorola phones are, the DROID 4 on Verizon is loaded with bloatware. Here are the applications that come pre-installed: Amazon Kindle, Verizon V-Cast Apps, Blockbuster, Google Books, Device Setup, Emergency Elerts, GoToMeeting application, Guided Tours, Help Center, Let’s Golf 2, Madden NFL 12, Mobile Hotspot, MOG Music, MOTOACTV, MOTOPRINT, My Verizon Mobile, Netflix, NFL Mobile, Quickoffice, Slacker Radio, Slingbox, V CAST Tones, Verizon Video, VideoSurf, and VZ Navigator. This list doesn’t count some of the normal applications we see on Android devices or the Blur applications. That’s a load of bloatware.

Inside of the DROID 4 lies a Texas Instruments OMAP4 dual-core processor clocked at 1.2 GHz. Like its brothers on Verizon which use this chip (Galaxy Nexus, Droid RAZR), the DROID 4 performs fairly well during everyday usage. There were occasional stutters throughout the interface, especially on the Blur Launcher. But, outside of the launcher, browsing, emailing, messaging, and gaming went off without a hitch. This is by far the fastest DROID QWERTY phone to date with a well-optimized batch of Motorola software on top of some great hardware. Unfortunately, the OMAP4 dual-core processors will soon be outdated as Tegra 3 smartphones hit the market. That’s something to be thinking about when buying a new phone. Smartphones with outdated chips often get left out of future game and application development.

Thankfully, the device popped in and out of landscape mode very quickly. This is important on a QWERTY equipped device, and it allows for faster text messaging.

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The backside speaker present on the DROID 4 was delightfully loud, much better than the one on the competing Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Audio quality was not optimal, but it was sharp enough to watch a Netflix video on the go.

The included 1785 mAh battery pack offered us roughly one full day of use with some moderate browsing, Gmail push syncing, and the occasional application use. Although we won’t see the DROID 4 destroying 3G devices in the battery department, it does stack up against the best of the 4G LTE lineup. Except for the Droid RAZR MAXX, the DROID 4 may be the top performing LTE handset when it comes down to battery consumption.

Motorola’s DROID 4 is the best phone on the market for those who need a QWERTY keyboard-equipped device. Outside of that niche, the DROID 4 fails to impress next to the RAZR, Galaxy Nexus, or iPhone 4S. Outdated, lackluster software and a middling LCD display bring this phone down a notch.