Bionic First Impressions/Reviews

[KillerG]

"as yet unexplained, bug that prevents me from"
"My TB smokes my Bionic consistantly loading web pages. At this point, I am returning the Bionic"

Thanks guys I forgot fragmented, lol, the truth sucks huh?

This guy doesn't give up trolling. Your experience may differ from others, that's the point of having so many different manufacturers, you can get exactly what you want.

And I had a little chat with my friend who's been waiting on this phone as long as I have yesterday, he seemed pretty happy.
Here's what he said:
Me: how did the Bionic work out?
Travis: Pretty good. Really happy about it.
Me: everything you wanted?
Travis: Compared to the OG Droid, it's night and day
Me: that's what I keep hearing, it's a great device
Travis:There are a couple of things I don't like, but I can live with
Me: but I keep hearing some mixed reports about battery life...what are you getting?
Travis: I don't like that you can't uninstall the preloaded bloatware
Me: that's ANY phone now, sorry...other than a Nexus
Travis: Well, when 4g comes, I'm guessing it could be pretty bad. The battery under 3g is better then my OG Droid by about 25%. I'm pretty much always around a charger and I might get a spare battery for when I need it.
Me: I'm thinking I'm going to go to Costco to get mine, just so I can have an extra charging dock in my car and an extra battery for when I need it too. I did notice that they have a strange way of hooking up the car dock...but it may work out good for my system in my car. But are you on all like high performance settings?
Travis: I haven't changed much. I'm sure I could tinker it some and get better battery life. I'll let other people figure it out and then see what works. Screen is awesome and I can't wait for 4g
Me: yeah we should have it like thursday or so. But I didn't look for anyone else on the list, were you guys on it?
Travis: Yeah, it's all the way up the coast to Santa Maria including Buellton and Solvang.
Me: nice! I keep hearing a lot of people griping about the screen, any problems with that?
Travis: Not sure what they are complaining about. It's beautiful. Maybe they are comparing it to something else that I haven't seen. It's a lot better then the OG Droid, so It's a win for me
Me: some people are too picky about that RGBW pentile matrix. I think they just see the pixels because they WANT to see them. I know I didn't, I looked at the X2 and Droid 3...nothing. They both looked amazing.
Travis: I haven't seen any
Travis is a friend of mine, and he's extremely picky about EVERYTHING, trust me. So I'm pretty sure I at least personally will enjoy it as much as him or more, and I have no clue as to why you people are having problems.

And I may get lucky later tomorrow and be able to buy my Bionic tomorrow and monday. Someone wants my old Rock Band set I have up for $150. As long as she's happy with it, I'll be up at $275 tomorrow from my $125 right now. $275 of $300 is pretty close, and my mom was saying she might lend a little of money to me using her credit card (lol that's not a loan) if I'm less than $100 short. I've still got some stuff up on eBay...so we'll see.

 

[jagnth]

From what I have been able to do with the phone, I really like it, however, we are having 4g issues in our area which supposedly means my phone will not do data at all!!! I called Verizon support and they indicated that the 4g phones will not work on 3g if there is a 4g network outage. Huh??? But that seems to be what is happening, can't do any data type stuff so for right now, it's just a really pretty cellphone!

You can disable the 4G by going into your settings and then Wireless & Networks->Mobile Networks->Network Mode and then enable CDMA. I did this as I had heard it will prolong batter life as LTE is power hungry. I was connected at 3G and was able to use the data. Possibly you could try this to allow the phone to use the 3G, though I would have thought that the phone would switch automatically...so I agree with you that what Verizon told you is odd.

 

[bberrynewbie84]

My second day with the phone and it's going ok,the battery is kinda disappointing and I guess the pentile has to grow on me

 

[xoomer1]

my battery yesterday was bad, I took beautiful weather off and after a whole day, its still now mostly charged...

 

[Scout_313]

I've had my Bionic since yesterday and so far I'm loving it. Personally, I find the screen to be very acceptable. The phone itself is extremely fast and appears to have gotten rid of a lot of the lag I experienced with all of my previous Android devices (like when managing the installed applications in the settings menu). I was also amazed at how small this phone is. I can't remember which website it was, but they said that the Bionic at its thinnest point was thicker than the Droid X at its thickest point. For all the updated hardware that this phone has, I found it to be almost the same size as the Droid X. Speaking of the Droid X, I much prefer the capacitive buttons of the Bionic over the physical buttons of the X. I can't really comment on battery life yet as today will be my first day starting off with a full charge and I finished downloading all of my old apps and set things up the way that I like them.

The only bug that I've been able to reproduce a couple times is when I add apps from the app drawer to the home screen. Occasionally it takes ~30 seconds to actually show up. One time I thought I did something wrong so I tried it again. After a little while 2 of the same icon appeared on the screen. It only happened once or twice but it's definitely not a deal breaker by any means. I tend to switch phones VERY often but I think I'll be keeping the Bionic for a while, at least until the second gen LTE chips come out and they release a thinner phone with a smaller (~4 inch) screen.

 

[SnydersWeb]

I've had the chance to play with this since Thursday and have had a chance now to get a good feel for where it's at and find some of the quirks about the phone.

Aesthetics
Outside of the phone looks nice. Not extremely excited over the plastic back on this phone but It's not anything problematic really.

Screen
I do notice the Pentile display.

The colors overall are fine, I notice that when viewed from different angles, the colors change a tad. Viewed straight on they look "true" but the blues tend to fade to a teal tint when viewed at an angle. The colors, when the screen is viewed straight on is actually consistent with what I see on the LapDock display and TV screen via HDMI cable so you can't blame the Pentile on it.

Some of the gradient banding appears to be just some of the phone itself, not necessarily the screen. So really I would encourage all the "grr, I see pixels.. hate..." to hook this thing up to an HDMI cable and take a look for yourself.

I brought it outside and yeah, you can actually use this phone in bright sunlight which is pretty nice. Overall it'll do quite nicely, and I have no real complaints.

Hardware
Has a fairly solid feel to it. Headphone jack snaps in and out nicely and solidly.. Doesn't suffer any of the problems the D1 had. I do hear a little buzz in the headphone jack, most of the time I use bluetooth anyway so it's not a big problem.

It's surprisingly light.

Phone - including bluetooth & speakerphone usage
Calls are loud, strong and clear. Speakerphone works quite well. I have had it connected via bluetooth to my 4Runner's headunit (JVC KW-XR810) my Motorola S9-HD, Jawbone and my computer bluetooth adapter and it performs better than my D1 by far. I like the fact it sends song data to my headunit and my PC.

Overall User Interface (including Motoblur)
I can actually say I do like this blur. At first when I played around w/my Wife's DroidX I hated it. There are times I wish the facebook widget would let you sync with existing contacts (this all or nothing crap is annoying).

Some of the polishes to the phone make it easier to use. Really at this point there is no motivation on my part to run a custom ROM. My old Droid 1 was running Cyanogen.

Widgets
The Blur scrollable calendar widget is nice. I also rather like the contacts widget. The Social networking ones have a lot of apparent polish but still leave a bit be desired. Overall II plan to stick with my Beautiful Widgets home.

Signal quality (Compared to other devices)
Strong overall. Gets a solid lock on my wireless AP and 4G when I'm away. So far I haven't dropped a call but there's one area that I will be testing in the next few months or so where my D1 would frequently drop signal.

Seems to also do a better job keeping locked onto things than my wife's DroidX.

GPS
Works great, seems to get a fix fairly quickly. Oddly I do see information on the satellites itself when I use GPS Status app (recommended). I wasn't' expecting to see that given some of the information about the way this phone handles GPS.

Social Networking
Motos built in widgets for this are interesting but not really a good replacement for the full and normal App. If they had any advantage at all it would be for the consolidation of disparate sources.

Email/Calendar
Thumbs up. I do like them. They handle quite well and are easy to use. The mail client in this phone has the actual ability to move an email message to a different folder. This is something I never saw on my Droid1's Cyanogen mail client.

Battery Life
It's hard for me to have an accurate assessment of the battery. So on that I'm going to have to leave that to others who have reviewed it.

Performance
FAST! Very fast! Compared to my old Droid1 and my wife's DroidX this thing is scorching hot fast.

Data speeds are epic. Very very fast. Ran side by side w/a coworkers Tbolt on Speed Test and the Bionic beat it handily. Completely ran circles around my wife's stock DroidX on both wireless and network. I would/should get a straight 3G comparison too to see.

Everything just seems to happen faster on this phone. I spend no time telling this phone "c'mon.." like I would my D1.

Media (music, movies, DLNA)
Haven't done too much in this respect so it's hard to give a good review. Music player is good/works and the gallary shows off some polish, not sure if there is any real advantage of this one over stock. Music player seems to be a retouched stock.

Keyboard's
Swype built in is nice. I like it.

Camera (both still & video)
Works OK. Really I don't use this too much unless I'm in a pinch. I own an Olympus E-3 with some pretty nice glass on it so unless it's a DSLR it's a step down from what I like. I expect it's better than my Droid1. The way I see it is my phone happens to take pictures, not my camera happens to be a phone.

How the Bionic compares to your previous smartphone (if applicable)
Bionic vs Droid1.. you kidding? Those holding onto a Droid1 for the upgrade will be pleased. It's even a huge upgrade from the DroidX.

The WebTop/LapDock is pretty darn cool. I like it! It's absolutely CRYING for a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) client though. If it had this, it would be just perfect. God willing someone will make one or Moto will. I do not use Citrix nor do I care about Citrix.

You can see more of my opinions of the LapDock here:
http://forums.androidcentral.com/bionic-accessories/116925-bought-lapdock.html

Disappointments (if any)
Would be nice if we could set the number of home screens. I used 5 on my old Droid1 so it's not a crises or anything. I've had the phone crash a couple of times when I was using the HDMI Mirroring.

Another disappointment is VZW's insistence on the up-your-arseware they force onto the phone. I'm sure some of what they push on there is great wonderful and so on.. but VZW, the more you try to force something onto me, the more I'll resist it. Simple as that. This is MY phone, not yours.

Overall though it's what I expected and I'm not disappointed at all.

 

[Scout_313]

Another disappointment is VZW's insistence on the up-your-arseware they force onto the phone. I'm sure some of what they push on there is great wonderful and so on.. but VZW, the more you try to force something onto me, the more I'll resist it. Simple as that. This is MY phone, not yours.

Overall though it's what I expected and I'm not disappointed at all.

I completely agree about the bloatware. I can honestly say that I won't use 75+% of the apps that come installed on the phone that cannot be removed. I'm just really happy that Motorola's Blur gives you the chance to make separate folders for the app drawer. I just made a Favorites folder and filled it with the apps that I'll actually use.

 

[wpwoodjr]

Thanks for the examples. That shows a lot of noise reduction which causes that smearing effect. It also shows that both cameras a pretty crappy.

The Bionic takes great photos for a camera phone. When you say it's photos are crappy what are you comparing it to? A digital SLR?

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk

 

[wpwoodjr]

I think you are trying to look way way to hard at things...its a 4.3 inch screen on a phone..looks about the same as on my 30in HD dell moitor

I didn't have to look hard its obvious. My Droid X doesn't have banding like that. I don't know what's wrong with your Dell.

Go to other pages on DPReview and you will see much more obvious grayscale banding.

BTW this is not something I'm all bent out of shape about.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk

 

[KillerG]

Gotta love android..The only OS you have to hack/tweak to make it work properly. Also has major bugs and failures out of the box..Believe me I know, I have a nexus s 4g with 2 apps installed on it and all stock...freeze ups, lag, and all kind of crap. There will never be an android phone without major bugs and errors...believe that.

If you don't like it, don't buy an Android phone. Why are you in a Droid Bionic forum if you think the operating system is crap? Go buy your little iPhone and let Apple tell you how to run your life.

 

[wpwoodjr]

I've had the chance to play with this since Thursday and have had a chance now to get a good feel for where it's at and find some of the quirks about the phone.
...
The WebTop/LapDock is pretty darn cool. I like it! It's absolutely CRYING for a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) client though. If it had this, it would be just perfect. God willing someone will make one or Moto will. I do not use Citrix nor do I care about Citrix.

There is an RDP client for Android made by Wyse called Pocketcloud. Works really nicely on the small screen.

 

[916ninja]

There is an RDP client for Android made by Wyse called Pocketcloud. Works really nicely on the small screen.

Haha my company uses Wyse thin clients and citrix... Horrible combo in my company and line of work.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk

 

[SnydersWeb]

There is an RDP client for Android made by Wyse called Pocketcloud. Works really nicely on the small screen.

Android is one thing.. WebTop Sadly is a bit different. On the Android apps it confines it to just what the phone's screen is. So you'll need a version that specifically supports WebTop.

Regardless I'll try that Pocketcloud client to see if it is any better than the app I was using.

 

[nickacs]

Got mine last night coming from an OG Incredible. Boy is this phone like night/day! I got that annoying HTC bug with the 'low space' on my Incredible twice now in a year and had to Factory Reset both times and things would work again for about 3 months. Well, it happened again now constantly since the Gingerbread update last week, so I said F this and went to my local Verizon store last night.

I played around with the Bionic display for about 5 mins and was sold. Sure the screen isn't as vibrant/colorful as the Samsung Charge that was right next to it, but I guess I really don't care? I see what people are talking about, but the pentile screen doesn't both me one bit. I'm more looking for a phone that has the options/apps I need rather than something that looks pretty. Just my 2 cents

The phone is FAST as everyone has already said. Hands down this is lightning compared to my Incredible. Re-downloaded some of my old apps and before I could blink, they were downloaded! 10x faster at least!!

Yea, I really like the Sense UI, but the Blur isn't that bad to me. Getting any new launcher can simply get me back to that side, so not a big issue for me.

Battery life so far has been good, considering the phone only came with about 15% last night, so I depleted that in about 3hrs of downloading and playing around with the phone. But today, being up for 4 hours, battery with 4G is still at 80%. We'll see how my first full day with the phone holds up!

4G has been awesome so far being in Atlanta, it was a no brainer to upgrade to a 4G device. No issues, no dropped calls, calls have been clear for me and people on other end. Excellent...

All in all, I'm 100% pleased so far and will continue to hammer the phone some more and see if I still like it, esp with the 4G/battery life.

Thanks for everyone's reviews and opinions! I read a lot of them yesterday and helped my decision

 

[dcgore]

If it wasn't i am such a nut for having a very competitive phone, i would've kept the bionic. The phone is awesome but 6 months too late. I am sure if there weren't any rumors about the vigor or the prime, i would still have it.

 

[wpwoodjr]

The Bionic is a great phone, basically what I hoped the DX2 would be, with the option for 4G. It has twice of everything the DX had - RAM, network speed (10X really), screen res, cpu power, graphics power, much faster GPS locking, 1080p video. Quite amazing really.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk

 

[bplewis24]

I love everything about the phone so far but it's going back if I can't figure out what's going on with my battery. I can't go even half a day with the phone even without using it other than clearing out notifications.

Brandon

 

[EnergyPlus]

Two days with my Bionic and liking it more snd more, though the battery, while not unacceptable, clearly isnt like my old BB. But then, it's 100 times faster!

 

[patencio]

Random question, but how are the live wallpapers? On my Droid X they seem to make everything noticeably sluggish. I'm hoping with dual core and 1 Gig of Ram this goes away and everything is much smoother. Can anyone chime in on this small detail??

The battery with Android OS is my main complaint. I hear it's getting better in 3.0 but I do not know, do I? god damn Verizon or Google or HTC are not pushing the updates out are they, the f'n bums...

 

[geeksbsmrt]

Aesthetics - I really like the look and feel of this phone. I upgraded from an OG Droid and have got to say Moto did a good job in the looks department.

Screen - For the most part the screen is good. Most colors are properly depicted. However, I did notice that some yellow's are not reproduced properly (they have a little too much red in the mix causing a brownish tint.) This can be clearly seen in the Anduko application. For example if you were to highlight a 1 in the game all the other 1's get highlighted in yellow. On my OG Droid it was a bright and vibrant banana color. On the Bionic it is a duller dijon mustard color.

Hardware - Quality wise the build is surprisingly light and feels solid. I really like the speed of operation. However, I'm coming from an OG Overclocked at 1.1 using RaidZero's LV kernel running Bugless Beast.

Phone - I have not used bluetooth or speaker phone yet but in true Moto fashion the internal speaker reproduces sound well. Voices are life-like and crisp. The other parties report similar results from the microphone.

Overall User Interface (including Motoblur) - The UI for a regular user is intuitive and very easy to use. I must admit however that I am not one such user. I would very much like to see options to add a 5th button to the dock (the bottom set of 4 buttons that appear on every screen), the ability to have multiple docks (similar to LauncherPro or Go Launcher EX, they both allow up to 3 dock bars that can be scrolled through.) I also do not like the app drawer layout. I much prefer a continuous vertical scroll as opposed to the stock left-right pagination. I do like the look though, it is very nice to look at.

Widgets - The widgets to me are a plus/minus some of them are very nice (the contacts widget for your favorite contacts, the gallery widget though it seems to update slowly) and some are not so good (calendar only shows a week view and nothing about the current days events but lists events on future dates, the weather widget to me is a bit bland.) Overall it really comes down to what you need the widgets to do and some just don't cut it for me while others a very visually appealing and functional.

Signal quality (Compared to other devices) - Seems to be good, I do however live very close to multiple VWZ antenna locations. Compared to my OG I do not see any better or worse reception at home or work.

GPS - What little I have used the GPS it is accurate it was able to pin-point me both at home and work and stayed with me on the drive between the two ~15 miles.

Social Networking - I rarely use any social networking other than Facebook to sync contact pictures and some phone numbers. The phone comes preloaded with a social networking app that SEEMS to be pretty nice. Like I said I haven't used it much so I can't comment on how well it actually works.

Email/Calendar - I have this setup with 3 gmail and a Microsoft Exchange 2007 Active Sync account. All mail works as intended with the push technology and I have not noticed any flaws as of yet. That is not to say that there are not. For example, in our environment (and it may just be our environment) HTC devices, specifically the EVO, and the Charge have had some calendar sync issues with our Exchange server. On these devices, typically when the calendar has over 5,000 events (prior and future) everything will remove itself from the phone calendar and will no longer sync the calendar with Exchange. The mail sync is unaffected when this occurs. I have not noticed this with the Bionic but I also do not have over 5,000 entries on my calendar. We believe that the issue may be caused by the third party UI's (Sense, TouchWiz, and possibly whatever it is Moto is calling Blur now if the Bionic is affected.) We came to this conclusion because the OG Droid and devices with ROMs without the UI enhancements seems to be unaffected.

Battery Life - I can not comment on the standard batter as I opted for the extended from day one. As with most the other 4G devices the battery life has room for improvement. However, with the extended battery, and a day of moderate usage (checking emails, a little netflix during lunch ~45 minutes, text messages 50-75, phone calls 10-15 5-10 minute calls) the battery lasts me from 5:30A to 10P without issue. I really don't look at percentages that much as long as my phone isn't shutting off on me I'm good with it.

Performance - This is where I am very impressed with the device. It is very snappy and responsive. Data speeds are outstanding, programs are smooth and I have not noticed any UI lag or force closes.

Media (music, movies, DLNA) - The media experience on this device is poor to say the least. I am VERY unhappy with playback. Let me preface this by saying that I am an audiophile. I can notice very slight oddities in my music. I tested the device with different headphones and the built in speaker. With all headphones (Beats In-ear Tour, Sennheiser CX-380, and a set of SkullCandy's) All media over the headphones produced a high-pitch whine that is only noticeable during either no sound reproduction or times of very soft reproduction. For the majority of my testing I used the Beats. Reproduced sound was true to life, crisp, and clear. I test many varieties of music (rap, rock, smooth jazz, contemporary easy listening, etc...) The bass lines punched as expected and were warm in the smoother music, the mids were rich and full, the highs were reproduced better than expected. Unfortunately with all devices not designed for high quality sound reproduction the highs are where you experience the most distortion, they were slightly tin sounding but were still very listenable. I was impressed that this type of sound quality was able to come from a phone.

Netflix streaming has a VERY annoying popping in the audio. This is in both the external speaker and in headphones. This is also apparently an issue with other devices as well. Hopefully this can be resolved with a software update.

Keyboard's - I have always been a fan of the Swype keyboard and was a member of their Beta program so I could have it on my OG. I can not complain about much on the keyboard. It does not come preloaded with all of the shorthand I use but I would not expect it to either.


How the Bionic compares to your previous smartphone (if applicable) - For the most part, the Bioinc blows my OG out of the water. However, the yellow color reproduction, and the two sound issues that the OG didn't have are a big concern for me.

Disappointments (if any) - The only things I can complain about with this phone are the whine in all audio playback, the popping in the Netflix app which affects other phones as well, and the yellow colors not always being rendered properly. Overall I am very satisfied with the device and may be able to live with the issues mentioned.