Tech Review: Droid 4 - 14 month benchmark

In my last review which was only about 3 months after I had gotten the phone I pointed out some of the specs regarding the Motorola Droid 4, and went over some of the pros and cons that I had found at the time. Now that I have owned it for 14 months, and I've seen the phone go full cycle with some of my friends as watched how it handled the tests of time and abuse from me, I figured now was as good a time as any to make a quick review of exactly what has happened with the phone.



In my last review the only beef I had, if I remember correctly, was that the headphone jack was a little wonky and the back plate was a pain in the ass to remove. Well since then I have discovered exactly how unnecessary it is to remove the back plate, so that has become so much less of a nuisance. Not to mention that the tab holding the back plate in can be pressed down and the back plate removed (in the same painful and rather inconvenient way as mentioned before) with just about any writing utensil and not just the stupid looking key they provide you with the phone. The headphone jack, while a bit touchy has stayed just about the same, no further issues have arisen from that whether it be further sound loss or more frequent dead spots in the socket. It pretty much stayed right at the condition it was in when I got it. I also found that the best way to fix any issues you might have with that socket is to first try twisting the headphone jack a little in 1 direction and see if that fixes it, if not, then just pull the jack out, and re-seat it. This will fix any sound loss 99% of the time.

Another chief concern I had walking out of the Verizon store with this phone was the power button, it looks flimsy, because it kind of is. not in the sense that it snapped clean in half after 3 uses or the switch below it gunked up and gave out 12 months in, but in the sense that it's a tiny piece of plastic with a tab on either long-wise edge, and it just kind of teeters on the awkwardly placed switch for the power button. This button, however, has held up surprisingly well given the unintentional abuse that all of my phones tend to get. Some of the metallic paint has rubbed off from the excessive use but other than that the button is still sound, still pops pretty damn close to as clean as it did when it came off the shelf and into my hands.

The Keyboard for the phone has held up well. Part of the reason I got rid of my old Droid 1 was that the buttons on my keyboard literally started peeling off the phone. the droid 1's keyboard was glued onto the phone's switches with some pretty weak rubber cement like stuff, however it looks like the Droid 4's keyboard is 1 solid piece of plastic that wraps under the circuit board?(I'm not 100% sure on this but that keyboard is not coming off) This is a beautiful thing because even though the paint is starting to rub off on the buttons, the actual keyboard itself still clicks and functions as well as it did on day 1.

The Gorilla Glass on the phone has held up well, there's not a single scratch on my screen despite being dropped several times, but that much cannot be said about the silver framing of the screen and the keyboard/body. It's made out of some very thinly painted and very flimsy plastic which has many dings and dents in it. The plus side to this, is that the plastic of that framing is so malleable that it hasn't actually cracked open or anything it just dents up, loses it's paint and becomes coarse.

Lastly, the charger port and the camera. I never had the opportunity of using the ultra-super-duper-sub-micro HDMI port on the phone because I don't record too much video, as such it's a little dusty, the charger port however has held up the test of time elegantly. I've had phones where the charger port is the first thing to go. Sometimes it's just not soldered in well enough and after about 20 months of just plugging and unplugging the power cord, it literally just recedes back into the body of the phone, making the charging process a little laborious. I also never used the front facing camera because I'm not too big on the whole "selfies" trend, so one can only assume that the front-facing camera has held up the test of time immaculately. The rear-facing camera however is incredibly grainy. I don't know if I just didn't notice this when I first got it, or if it's been worsening over time but that camera is seriously grainy for a 8MP camera. I've recently gotten into the hobby of painting miniature war gaming miniatures, I like to take photos of all my completed work and after the first photo shoot with my phones 8MP camera which should have been sufficient to take some decent high-depth photos, I never did it again. I propped the phone up so it wouldn't move in the slightest, put it on a timer then stepped far away from it till the photo took and it was still so grainy that viewed at maximum resolution it was so shitty, it was embarrassing.

Now onto the software side of things. When I got the Droid 4, it was running Android 2.3.5, then shortly after it's release (we're talking like 7-8 months) ICS (Android 4.0) came out for the phone. I had my phone rooted since day one in order to install Titanium Backup and save myself some time getting my phone back to where my last one was at. The root privileges prevented my phone from being able to even install ICS. So, I never went down that road with my phone even though it was one of the chief things I wanted when I was looking at a replacement for my last phone. Then only like a month and a half after ICS came out, all of my friends with Droid 4s started calling me with a long slew of problems that didn't exist until after they updated to ICS. Things like overheating issues, keyboards failing, phones magically shutting off whenever they felt like it. Battery life being slashed in half, the works. So all in all, I think that ICS was a bust for this phone. They released the phone with the intent of it running ICS, but they took too long releasing it in the end and it caused too many problems for the phone.

Lastly for this review i did want to point out one small issue, in the last few weeks, my physical keyboard will very occasionally just magically stop working. I'll type half a text and then they keyboard decides it's done working for the day kind of thing. I usually just switch to the touch screen keyboard to finish what I'm doing, restart my phone, and it's problem solved.

Do any of you own a Droid 4, and if so, do you have anything else that I didn't encounter to add to this review?

Tech Review: Motorola Droid 4

  The build up to the release of the Motorola Droid 4 was disappointing to say the least as it was originally scheduled to debut in Verizon stores December 8th with it's sister phone the Droid Razr just in time for Christmas. It was intended to be released on this date so that clients who wanted to upgrade their old Android phones with the latest and greatest had their choice of either going with the newest candybar design or going with the newest slider with full QWERTY keyboard.

Unfortunately there were a long slew of blizzard-esque release date pushbacks until finally, over two months later, the phone was officially released and available to the public. I was one of the first people to get my hands on this wonderful phone as it just so turned out that my 2-year contract expired only 24 hours after the phone hit the shelves. I have refrained from writing a review up until now because i've never really been one to be big on first impression reviews. They're generally filled with hype, excitement and very little factual information. As much as I would have liked to wait and write this review after Android OS 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) had been released for my phone, i feel that it is necessary now, 2 months after purchase to write my first impressions review.

Please keep in mind that my previous phone was the original Motorola Droid which did not weather well to say the least. The day i went to trade in phones, my Droid 1 was missing half the plastic pads that cover the bright pink tactile switches on the QWERTY keyboard, the power button's switch had long since jammed so that it was unpressable, the button itself had fallen out and the phone was running slow and bulky regardless of how well i cleaned up the internal storage. As such i knew what i expected to be fixed with the Droid 4.

The first thing i want to cover is the specific features of the phone itself:

• 1Ghz dual-core CPU
• 1GB on-board RAM
• 16GB onboard storage
• Mandatory SIMM Card (which stores about as much data as my Droid 1's on-board memory did)
• Non-removable battery pack
• mini-HDMI
• standard 3.5mm audio jack
• 8 MP Back camera
• 3 MP Front camera

As you can tell this phone is relatively well equipped, my first impressions of the phone's performance was that the phone itself was screaming fast. As my old Droid 1 was one of the first phones to be 3G compatible, it wasn't exactly capable of harnessing the full speed and functionality of 3G networks. At last that's my impression. Videos on youtube that would need to buffer every 4 seconds no longer need to buffer on a 3g connection with the Droid 4, it's 4G LTE compatiblity allows it to stream videos at speeds faster than the internet connections that are commonly found in peoples houses. Not to mention that the multitasking features that were originally promoted with the Android phone series are now so much smoother and easier to work with with the Dual-core CPU.

There are not too many known issues with the Droid 4 as of late but speaking with several tech support representatives, i was able to provide some interesting commentary to them and vise versa. Apparently one of the only known issues surrounding the Droid 4 to tech support firms is it's overheating issues. the nature of a dual-core CPU with now cooling system what so ever and it's battery design means the thing can get pretty freakin hot just off of it's pure processing power. The most common solution for this is the same way you rescue a bad hard drive long enough to pull data off it. Throw it in the freezer for two minutes (seriously, don't throw your new phone... EVER) and all is well. The most common issue i've come across is that the audio port is extremely flimsy.

I tend to use my phone for playing music in my car via a FM Transmitter (a device that plugs into your cigarette lighter port and creates an FM radio station at the frequency of your choice for a short radius. Generally wide enough to hit the car's antenna regardless of what side of the car it's on). As such, the audio port sees a lot of action and already, two months into owning it, i've noticed the audio port getting mighty touchy. At times, the port won't recognize an audio jack, and rotation of the jack itself will solve the problem as it hits a pin at just the right angle and starts transmitting data. Other times, regardless of how much you rotate the jack, the port will not grab a signal at all. Also, when i had first plugged in a pair of headphones into the phone, i realized very quickly that the audio port is very shallow. This may be an attributing factor to it's signal loss however it is very note worthy.

Next is the power button. As this was the first thing to officially go on my Droid 1, it was the first thing i genuinely paid attention to on the phone itself. The power button feels flimsy to say the least and i have plenty of reason to believe that this is a design flaw and that the power button will break long before the 2-year mark, just like it's great-grandmother. The phone also lacks a camera button as in a camera trigger button. meaning you always have to take photos by pressing the capture button inside the OS's camera app. To some this might be nothing new but i've always been used to my phones having a physical capture button (as you can tell i'm extremely tactile oriented. I need physical interaction with items not graphical representations of them) and as such it's kind of disorienting to me, it required quite a bit of getting used to and figuring out how to re-adjust my hands so i could take the photos without blocking the lens.

While on the note of the camera, the camera in this phone is a significant increase in quality from the Droid 1, as it has an additional 5 MP of horsepower to work with, it takes beautiful, high definition photos and can comfortably film 1080p. The frontside camera for those of you who live and breathe self-pics but hate having your phone in them, the Droid 4 sports a 3 MP frontside camera which takes photos of the same quality as the camera on Droid 1 which is not shoddy by any means.

An often over-looked feature on the phone itself is the back panel which must be removed in order to install the SIMM card and any Micro SD cards you may want to install into the computer. the back panel is not your traditional back panel which sides in 1 direction to unhook a set of holding hooks and it pops right off. Motorola decided to add an additional deterrent for people wishing to remove the integrated battery by making it so that the user must have a key that comes with the phone to remove the back panel. However even with the key, i found it extremely difficult to remove the panel as there is next to no surface area to get a grip on it. I would like to provide my methods for removing the back panel for anyone planning on getting this phone to save you from about 20 minutes of frustration. With the key in hand, you place it into the key hole which is extremely shallow, please keep this in mind, once the key is in just gently apply a small amount of pressure to the key so it is pressing gently against the bottom of the key hole. with that pressed, use one of your finger nails to pull downwards on the panel via the speaker hole. This will take a little bit of strength but it should pop right out.

Lastly, the QWERTY keyboard on this phone is masterfully designed as it no longer uses... Stickers... to cover the tactile switches, instead of uses one solid piece of plastic which is been laser cut and is backlit beautifully to discern where the buttons start, end and what buttons they are. There is an enjoyable pop when you press the buttons down which leads me to believe that the switches on this keyboard are the miniturized versions of Cherry MX switches which i love. The keyboard offers no stick or resistance when typing which allows for swift typing of larger compositions which i have to give props to as this phone is being promoted as an office phone and comes with a free copy of some mobile phone office program that comes with a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation program and a drawing program.

Overall, this phone is a fantastic phone. It certainly is a noticeable improvement on it's great-grandmother and all in all i've learned to adapt to the mistakes i've made for it. I will be releasing another review on it at the 1 year mark to cover how the phone has stood up to the test of time as it's 1-year warranty expires.

Do you have any experience with Android phones? What kind of phone do you use (regardless of whether it's Android)? Do you think you would spend the money on this phone?