Motorola Droid X: Review

My old HTC Touch (in Verizon, it’s called XV6900) has been acting up and battery doesn’t hold charge anymore and the Internet is intermittent at best. So when I heard that the new Motorola Droid X was coming out on July 15th, I started to wait. My 2-year contract ended back in June so at midnight of the 15th, I pulled the trigger and got i on Friday!

Others seem to be not as lucky as now, it won’t ship till the 25th. 😀

Here are the box shots and Droid X shots… The camera is an old Sony that doesn’t seem to take good shots so please do excuse me.

Droid X Box

Now the shot out of the box…

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The battery came fully charged!  And since I output all my contacts into CSV file and then imported it into Gmail account, syncing and updating my contacts was a breeze!  Not to mention that once you set up all your social networking accounts, Android 2.1 updates all the Facebook friends as well!  It was even sweeter once I learned that from the contacts list, you can see all the social networking friends’ updates!

Here are some of the generic shots…

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There are 7 windows where you can swipe through for different types of “setups”.  One for weather, one for social networking widgets, one for media etc.  I like that.  I also enjoyed the screen.  4.3″ screen is quite an ample size.  And yes, it has 512 MB of ROM memory, 8 GB internal & 16 GB SD card storage, along with 1 GHz processor!  On top of that, Verizon’s 3G network was a champ!  Android Marketplace worked just fine and all the apps installed quickly and w/o any hassle.

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Default browser wasn’t very attractive.  So I installed Opera Mini from the Market and I was happier then!  🙂  Also it did play DivX file just fine but I wanted better support so I searched for MKV in the Market and found a player called Rock Player.  Almost no hiccups at all, even in playing large MKV 720p files.  I am loving this!

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The screen is beautiful.  Pictures don’t do justice.  aGPS works well and with Google Maps, it went well!  MP3 works well.  And since I have unlimited 3G, I gave Slackware a try.  Just search for it on Android Market!  😉  The music will download and play seamlessly.  The overall experience was great.  However, there are two things that I didn’t like…

First is the heat.  When in use, it gets hot!  Especially where you are holding it.  Dang it.  Second is the battery.  It doesn’t last very long.  Yeah, they say you can talk for very long and such… but I gave it a moderately heavy usage and after 7 hours, battery color changed from healthy green to uh-oh orange and then to flashing green top bar and it was unresponsive from there.  I will probably carry the USB cable with car adapter and charge it in the car and at work.  So I suppose it won’t be terribly bad but still…

So my final score?  8.5 / 10

This thing delivers!  Here is the summary…

The Good: Everthing.  3G, widgets and apps, Android Market, seamless integration, smooth multimedia playback.

The Bad: It gets hot!  And battery drains fairly fast.