The front capacitive buttons work well, but the side volume controls are small and a bit hard to operate. The 3.5mm stereo jack is sensibly located up top and the micro USB and micro HDMI ports are on the left side. We noted a low volume high pitched whine when using a variety of wired headphones, and Motorola expects to have a software fix in November for this issue. The microSD card slot is under the back cover, stacked above the LTE SIM card slot. You don't need to remove the battery to access the included 16 gig card, but you do have to pull the battery to remove the SIM card (not that there's generally a reason to pull the LTE SIM card). The phone, though large, is very easy to operate one-handed. The capacitive buttons and display are all within reach of your thumb, with no contortion needed. The Bionic has a 4.3", 960 x 540 pixel capacitive multi-touch Gorilla Glass touch screen. That's currently the highest resolution available on Android phones, and it's a good match for the display size in terms of font sizes and image rendering. It's a PenTile display, which I know a few of you dislike, but we find it plenty good enough. Like most recent high end Moto Android displays, it's very bright, has very high contrast and a cool color bias (whites tend toward blue rather than yellow). The cool colors can make things look a little stark (human flesh lacks warmth), but it's really a matter of personal preference. The display isn't as super-saturated as Samsung's Super AMOLED Plus used on the Droid Charge. 4G LTE and Calling Motorola knows how to make phones, and we've come to expect very good voice quality as well as strong reception. The Droid Bionic delivers very good voice quality with good noise reduction, but reception on LTE is just average. Average isn't a bad thing, but this isn't one of those Moto phones that could get an LTE signal in a lead-lined box. 3G EV-DO Rev. A and 1x reception on the other hand are excellent. Data speeds on Verizon Wireless' 4GLTE network were as usual impressive. We averaged 18 megs down and 2.9 megs up according to Speedtest.net with a 3 out of 5 bar signal in the DFW metro region. Web pages obviously download quickly at those speeds; Adobe Flash content doesn't pause frequently to buffer and Netflix plays well. The Bionic can act as a mobile hotspot that shares its 4G/3G connection over WiFi for an additional $20/month. If you buy the Bionic with a contract, Verizon will require that you add a data plan, and these range from $30/month for 2 gigs of data to 10 gigs for $80/month (mobile hotspot increases your data allowance by 2 gigs and costs an additional $20/month). Beware: LTE is like using WiFi, and it's easy to consume lots of data. If you go to town streaming movies or consuming other high bandwidth content, you'll easily go through 5 gigs in a month. So use WiFi when you can if you want to avoid higher data plan pricing tiers. That said, when Verizon first introduced LTE phones, they offered special data plan pricing of $30/month for unlimited (really unlimited) data. I picked up a Bionic at the begininng of October 2011, and customer service offered me that plan, so you might get lucky. Horsepower and Performance Dual core CPUs have been a challenge to combine with an LTE radio in smartphones. Perhaps that's why Motorola switched from the Tegra 2 CPU to a TI OMAP dual core. We know Moto fell months behind getting the LTE radio upgrade ready for the Tegra 2 equipped Motorola Xoom, and we haven't seen LTE phones with that CPU (the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the first tablet to successfully combine the Tegra 2 and LTE). Whatever the reason, we don't mind the Texas Instruments CPU one bit; in fact it's a very solid performer. The TI OMAP4430 1GHz dual core CPU performs as well as the Tegra 2, and the only drawback is you lose access to the handful of Tegra Zone 3D games for Android. The phone scored 2126 in the Quadrant benchmark, and 59 in the Linpack multi-thread test. Those are excellent numbers that put the Bionic among top scoring phones. In terms of perceived performance, the Droid Bionic feels fast, and can handle Webtop handily when docked. Even with Motorola's custom software running on top of Gingerbread, the phone doesn't pause or lag with several apps running in the background. It handles Adobe Flash well and does well with 3D games. Among the handful of Verizon 4G LTE Android smartphones ( HTC Thunderbolt, Droid Charge by Samsung and the LG Revolution), the Droid Bionic is the only dual core, and is the fastest. |