Thoughts after using Bionic plus pictures

[KillerG]

If it doesn't matter then why did we all overclock our OG Droids? Yes it does matter. The better the chipset the better the device can handle the OS and the apps and tasks we throw at it. We overclock to overcompensate what was given to us.

I agree that this is the case TODAY but 12 months from now when we all will be doing XYZ with our phones we'll be wondering why they put a good (not great) chip in the phone.

Why overclock your OG Droid...umm because the chipset in there was not amazing in the first place. You can argue that apps have become more intensive over time, but at this point in time, only games can become more intensive. And if you're worried about the CPU, don't get the phone, that easy. Wait for a quad core phone, I don't care. I'm buying this one because I believe it to be one of the best phones on the market currently.
I can say at least for Gingerbread, a dual core 1 GHz CPU is almost overkill at this point, you don't NEED it to run it. You WANT it because it helps make it so you can multitask better and more efficiently. ICS could change the game, but obviously Google is going to make it use LESS power to run rather than MORE, at least they should be doing that.
Plus when it comes to games, it's really the GPU that needs a bump, not the CPU. The CPU can run several apps at a time and widgets, etc. and it will run games fine. Can't say for the next two years it will run all the top end games, but developers have really stuck with trying to get all their apps to work on most midrange to highrange phones.

 

[7H3LaughingMan]

Right. Verizon never shown any retail pricing. So let me get this straight...vzw is selling retail for $589.99....it cost best buy $589.99.

What do you know.... the same value down to the penny. Concidence???
Sent from my Droid using Tapatalk

Not really, since I happen to work at a Premium Retailer where we have 100% exact Retail Price as Verizon's on every thing because we are stated to put it as that by Verizon. I have yet to see anything that says Verizon is selling it for $589.99 to a consumer.

 

[moondrius]

Actually, it looks like the phone will retail for $700. The 589.99 is the cost to companies. Add retail markup. See Phandroid. This is the first and only screen shot of what seems to be an internal document. The title of the doc is "9%204%202011%20...." If you look at web searches it will replace a space with %20 so that makes the title "9 4 2011 pricing". This would be a screen cap of a document on BBY's internal web service making it seem semi-legit.

If you look at the Bionic's line it reads: VZW Moto Bionic SKU Cost (to BBY) retail (to customer) contract pricing.

If you can find me another pic with a brownish background of BBY's internal stock app called RSS (Retek) I can give you more info.

It will retail at Best Buy for 699 no doubt about it. They are always 150-200 more then Verizon.

 

[GBH2]

Quadrant is everything right now. We're phone geeks and right now not much else matters. The Bionic's OMAP 4430 can't hold a candle to the Exynos 4210 - the Galaxy's chip is also clocked higher. I believe the OMAP 4430s can be clocked up to 1.2GHz but Moto didn't crank it for the Bionic - probably to save battery life - which we can all appreciate too.

I respectfully disagree.

Exynos 4210 is a fine SoC, but TI OMAP 4430 is at least comparable.

AnandTech - LG Optimus 3D Preliminary Performance - OMAP4 Tested

Don't pay attention to this 4430, 4460, 4470 "can be clocked up to" nonsense - the A9 cores are almost certainly the same silicon binned into clock groupings. I would be surprised if most 4430's couldn't be clocked to 1.8GHz.

While raising the clock speed will provide some performance gains it will also negatively effect battery life, as you mentioned, and increase heat and decrease the lifespan of the chip. While going form 1.0GHz to 1.2GHz will give a big jump in Quadrant scores it will not give any significant performance increase.

The "phone geeks" that I know can appreciate that some benchmarks can provide some valuable insight into performance of a given phone, they consider "Quadrant" to be the least reliable indicator of actual real world performance.

I think, though, that we can probably just agree to disagree and move on.

 

[dcdevito]

I respectfully disagree.

Exynos 4210 is a fine SoC, but TI OMAP 4430 is at least comparable.

AnandTech - LG Optimus 3D Preliminary Performance - OMAP4 Tested

Don't pay attention to this 4430, 4460, 4470 "can be clocked up to" nonsense - the A9 cores are almost certainly the same silicon binned into clock groupings. I would be surprised if most 4430's couldn't be clocked to 1.8GHz.

While raising the clock speed will provide some performance gains it will also negatively effect battery life, as you mentioned, and increase heat and decrease the lifespan of the chip. While going form 1.0GHz to 1.2GHz will give a big jump in Quadrant scores it will not give any significant performance increase.

The "phone geeks" that I know can appreciate that some benchmarks can provide some valuable insight into performance of a given phone, they consider "Quadrant" to be the least reliable indicator of actual real world performance.

I think, though, that we can probably just agree to disagree and move on.

Okay - but at least agree with me when I say that if the Bionic comes in with a Quadrant score of 3000 you won't get all hyped up over it?!

 

[pnoozi]

The phone does have a LED light like almost all motorola phones and yes, the vehicle dock charges the phone.

Thank you!

 

[tdizzel]

If it doesn't matter then why did we all overclock our OG Droids? Yes it does matter. The better the chipset the better the device can handle the OS and the apps and tasks we throw at it. We overclock to overcompensate what was given to us.

I agree that this is the case TODAY but 12 months from now when we all will be doing XYZ with our phones we'll be wondering why they put a good (not great) chip in the phone.

I never overclocked my OG Droid, and except for that augmented reality app for the bionic contest, it has done everything i've wanted it to. It still runs well enough that if the bionic isn't what I expect it to be, I will have no problem holding out until the next phone comes out. And this phone is nearly 2 years old. The Bionic's chipset is much better and will be far more futureproofed than the one in the OG Droid. So to me, the difference between 1.0 Ghz and 1.5 doesn't matter at all

 

[Johnly]

quadrant can be manipulated like a locked loader, don't ever trust that as a overall phone score performance module...but it is a good ball park figure, give or take several hundred.

 

[Johnly]

I never overclocked my OG Droid, and except for that augmented reality app for the bionic contest, it has done everything i've wanted it to. It still runs well enough that if the bionic isn't what I expect it to be, I will have no problem holding out until the next phone comes out. And this phone is nearly 2 years old. The Bionic's chipset is much better and will be far more futureproofed than the one in the OG Droid. So to me, the difference between 1.0 Ghz and 1.5 doesn't matter at all

serious? A phone @.500 MHZ is nothing to count?

 

[tdizzel]

Quadrant is everything right now. We're phone geeks and right now not much else matters. The Bionic's OMAP 4430 can't hold a candle to the Exynos 4210 - the Galaxy's chip is also clocked higher. I believe the OMAP 4430s can be clocked up to 1.2GHz but Moto didn't crank it for the Bionic - probably to save battery life - which we can all appreciate too.

After reading some of your posts I'm kinda curious about something. Do you even care about real world performance, or are you just spec happy so you can have something with "top notch" specs that you can brag about?

 

[dcdevito]

serious? A phone @.500 MHZ is nothing to count?

I know - that's what I'm saying. It's a HUGE difference. If I don't overclock my OG then it runs Gingerbread like crap. 50% difference is a hell of a difference.

 

[Jeff43]

If it doesn't matter then why did we all overclock our OG Droids? Yes it does matter. The better the chipset the better the device can handle the OS and the apps and tasks we throw at it. We overclock to overcompensate what was given to us.

I agree that this is the case TODAY but 12 months from now when we all will be doing XYZ with our phones we'll be wondering why they put a good (not great) chip in the phone.

We landed 3 men on the Moon with essentially the computing power of a scientific calculator (2Mhz).

And here we are 42yrs later, grumbling about a measly 1Ghz dual core processor in our phones..

Not trying to make a point, as much as thinking out loud on just how far we've come technically.

 

[dcdevito]

After reading some of your posts I'm kinda curious about something. Do you even care about real world performance, or are you just spec happy so you can have something with "top notch" specs that you can brag about?

Okay - then answer my next question.

What if I told you the Bionic has a 900MHz chip and 512MB of RAM. Would you care about real world performance then?

 

[tdizzel]

serious? A phone @.500 MHZ is nothing to count?

Clock speed isn't everything. It hasn't been since somewhere around 2003
For a non-phone example, my desktop computer has an AMD Phenom dual core clocked at 2.6 Ghz. My laptop has a core i3 clocked at 2.1 Ghz, and yep, my laptop is faster than my desktop.

 

[tdizzel]

Okay - then answer my next question.

What if I told you the Bionic has a 900MHz chip and 512MB of RAM. Would you care about real world performance then?

If you told me the Bionic has a 250Mhz chip and 56k of RAM and the real world performance was what we've seen in the videos so far, I would be perfectly happy with that. Specs mean absolutely nothing to me, I'm concerned about how it performs.

 

[techtied]

Linkify. New Bionic forum, video of phone!
http://forums.androidcentral.com/droid-bionic/115848-my-bionic.html

 

[dcdevito]

Clock speed isn't everything. It hasn't been since somewhere around 2003
For a non-phone example, my desktop computer has an AMD Phenom dual core clocked at 2.6 Ghz. My laptop has a core i3 clocked at 2.1 Ghz, and yep, my laptop is faster than my desktop.

Clock speed alone, no. Chipset (dual-core), clock speed, RAM, GPU - then yes - add it all up and yes it does matter. We all know that if a newer phone comes out in 3 weeks while we're all rocking our Bionics we'll all have phone envy. That's what being a phone geek is all about. Otherwise you wouldn't be on this thread.

 

[irl Panda]

Actually, it looks like the phone will retail for $700. The 589.99 is the cost to companies. Add retail markup. See Phandroid. This is the first and only screen shot of what seems to be an internal document. The title of the doc is "9%204%202011%20...." If you look at web searches it will replace a space with %20 so that makes the title "9 4 2011 pricing". This would be a screen cap of a document on BBY's internal web service making it seem semi-legit.

If you look at the Bionic's line it reads: VZW Moto Bionic SKU Cost (to BBY) retail (to customer) contract pricing.

If you can find me another pic with a brownish background of BBY's internal stock app called RSS (Retek) I can give you more info.

EDIT:

Droid Attic

I can confirm all of these screen shots are from ETK (Employee Tool Kit). Retail at BBY will be $699.99 as shown in first shot.

You guys are comparing VZW to BB. BB, we know, prices their phones higher off contract.

If we take a look around at Verizon's site, we begin to get a better ballpark image:

Charge - $569
Revolution - $559
Thunderbolt - $569
Droid 3 - $459
Droid X2 - $449
Incredible 2 - $439

There appears to be a $100 difference between phones with an LTE radio. Virtually no difference between phones with dual-core and single-core. Compare those prices with the ones you find at BBM.

 

[irl Panda]

Clock speed alone, no. Chipset (dual-core), clock speed, RAM, GPU - then yes - add it all up and yes it does matter. We all know that if a newer phone comes out in 3 weeks while we're all rocking our Bionics we'll all have phone envy. That's what being a phone geek is all about. Otherwise you wouldn't be on this thread.

You're a numbers consumer, which isn't a good idea. ESPECIALLY when it comes to technology. The phone coming out after the Bionic is the Vigor, and I definitely don't look at that phone with envy!

 

[geeksbsmrt]

You guys are comparing VZW to BB. BB, we know, prices their phones higher off contract.

Yes,

I did not put Best Buy in my first sentence but clarified in the edit. They will always have a markup for their overhead. I would also plan for $700 retail at other NON-VZW stores. Though I have not done historic pricing differences, so if I am incorrect please feel free to let me know.