Motorola Droid X: Thoroughly Reviewed
by Brian Klug on July 20, 2010 4:27 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Motorola Droid X
- OMAP
- Mobile
Video
The X joins a number of smartphones shooting 720P video. It shoots 1280x720 video in MPEG-4 format at a full 30 FPS with AAC audio. This is up from the 24 FPS of the original Motorola Droid as mentioned earlier. Average video bitrate is nearly 1 megabyte/s. As expected, you can force the LED on and shoot video with illumination. 720P video capture is limited to 30 minutes at a time.
The layout of the video interface is virtually identical to the still interface. You can launch camcorder to get directly to shooting video, or just use camera for stills, or either one and switch between.
I found video quality to be almost as good as the iPhone 4’s, which is arguably the current leader. The EVO 4G’s video looks oversaturated and uses a noticeably worse audio codec, AMR narrowband. Though video bitrate is almost the same, I notice more blocking in the EVO 4G’s video than the X’s. I shot the X and EVO videos in the same hand at the exact same time, so feel free to do comparison on your own. Still, it’s hard to deny that the X’s video doesn’t look much more like what you’d expect, and the difference is all software and that SoC difference surprisingly.
Motorola Droid X
HTC EVO 4G
Nexus One
iPhone 4
HTC Droid Incredible
Motorola Droid
Nokia N900
The X also uses that three microphone array to do a lot of special noise canceling. The result is four different audio “scenes” for the user when in video mode. Everyday captures audio from every microphone, outdoors reduces wind noise, concert is for preventing microphone distortion and capturing loud music videos, narrative is for capturing videos while commenting on the scene, and lastly subject is for capturing video with audio from the front of the camera. I tried all of the audio scenes with the exception of subject, and found that they actually do a decently good job.
I’m impressed with how good of a job the narrative mode did - while shooting the video I couldn’t hear myself talk most of the time and didn’t expect much in the way of results. My test videos are the following:
Droid X - Outdoor Setting
Droid X - Narrative Setting
Droid X - Everyday Setting
Droid X - Concert Setting
Unless I’m mistaken, the X has the most microphones of any smartphone on the market, and I think Motorola has put some interesting use scenarios together with their five different sound scenes. It’s interesting that Motorola bills the X as a camcorder, dedicating a special application tile to camcorder over stills.
But that's not all, there's also video shooting modes that are a bit special, same as there were camera modes for stills. The X provides settings for slow motion and fast motion. When I saw the slow motion setting, I immediately suspected that higher framerate would come at the cost of video resolution. Really there are two reasons for that - pixel binning to gather enough light given a faster (shorter) integration time, and to keep the load on the SoC video encoder block the same.
As you'll see shortly, my suspicions were correct. Slow motion video is shot at 320x240 with no audio. Similarly, fast motion mode seems to reduce sampling but keep the encoded rate the same, similarly there is no audio in the file.
Droid X - Slow Motion Setting
Droid X - Fast Motion Setting
I did encounter one rather catastrophic crash while testing. After changing microphone effect modes, the camera preview went portrait, ditched all of the control interface, and refused to quit. After a minute of mashing the home button, I was able to finally get back to the home screen, but launching the camera again yielded the same thing. This all happened live, right where I was shooting test videos on the corner.
See what's wrong?
A reboot solved the whole thing, but perhaps this is something Motorola could take a look at fixing.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
89 Comments
View All Comments
Jonathan Dum - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 - link
Thanks for the comprehensive and all around excellent review, but I have one caveat.As far as Android phones go, their multitouch screen controllers have tended to be sub par (try any multitouch on a nexus one, for example). I would like to know if there's any noticeable difference between these newest phones and older Android phones with capacitive screens.
As always, keep rocking these reviews, Anand. ;)
Frangible - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 - link
I've not used another Android device, but it's hypersensitive compared to my iPad/iPod Touch. Portrait keyboard mode drives me nuts. If the touchscreen were alive, I'd say it would have a degenerarive demyelinating disease. Unfortunately putting prednsone tablets on my Droid X does nothing.It's so twitchy I can blow away the Blur, Swype, and even a modded HTC keyboard with Graffiti (free from Android Market btw). And that's Graffiti with my *thumb*, in portrait or landscape. If I started using my Pogo stylus... oh, it would be*on*.
Clearly, others don't share my opinion, but the touchscreen on the Droid X is incredibly fruuuuustrating at times.
Frangible - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 - link
As a new Droid X owner, let me first say thanks for another great in-depth review, especially regarding the screeen details-- I just have to know these things, dammit.Anyway, just wanted to make two screen-related comments:
1. The outdoor screen comparison pics don't show any obvious transreflective displays. This either means none of them were, or they weren't angled in a way where a transreflective display would be obviously better.
FWIW, my iPod Touch Gen 1 has a TRD, and even my iPad's display is somewhat TRD (though with poorer contrast than the iPod or even a Tungsten TX in direct sunlight; a consequence of a lesser area of reflectivity, or the IPS display?) I don't know which of the iPhones have TRDs, but it would seem likely the iPhone 4G would be on par with the iPad.
Anyway, a TRD adds a LOT to outdoor viewing if you angle it correctly. You can even turn down, or off, the backlight.
The Droid X is certainly not TR, and was worse than my much dimmer Moto Q9C outdoors (due to the touch layer). And yeah sadly, the Tungsten Tx on min bright was better. So that's why I bring this up-- TRDs are the daywalkers of the LCD underworld, so imo this should be accounted for in outdoor comparisons.
2. I looked at the pixel structures of a variety of displays under a 100x light microscope. The Droid X's sub-pixels are divided into two sections, each with a black "hole". It looked quite similar to the PSP Go's subpixels, though with a standard RGB pattern and lack of the chevron textures on the PSP Go's. I assume this is some TN variant? Does anyone which kind?
The iPad's subpixels were divided into to halves of a series of stacked chevron color bars. Only the green subpixel had the "hole" (transistor?) which looked an awful lot like a mandlebrot fractal to me. FWIW.
ImSpartacus - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 - link
I always love reading ATech's reviews, but this one was especially wonderful.I laughed out loud at the following sentence:
"Everything about the X seems like it can be followed up with a 'that’s what she said.'"
Simply hilarious.
The0ne - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 - link
Yes, I especially love some of the very technical tests as well. For example...1. I let my wife use it for a day and she likes it...
2. I work in milliseconds so having a webpage load 1s makes any other phone besides iphone a no go
3. I have no fcking clue about real multi-tasking, although I know it's been around for decades, but I'll just demand for it and do a bat-shit review of it.
4. My wife and kids love it so it's an editor's choice! Go buy it.
5. It only has a few thousand apps, not the millions and millions of apps like iphone so it's crap, regardless if many of those millions of shtty apps and dictated.
Obviously, I'm exaggerating the comments to the extreme but the basis is there. While at it the review might as well include the orgasmic scene from the movie "When Harry met Sally."
honkj - Tuesday, August 17, 2010 - link
for anyone wondering why that survey showed iPhone owners get more sex...this "theone" guy pretty much shows how clueless and geeky and "lady" hating, some Android fanboys come off to the opposite sex.....
actually they just come off as hating anything that moves.
jasperjones - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 - link
a dozen comments already that point out the high quality of the review. it's getting boring. anyway, +1, excellent review. i've made critical comments on your smartphone reviews earlier this year. but the last couple of reviews were just awesome, and my confidence in AT is fully restored :)Hazdaz - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 - link
It is so nice to read a review that is more than just a corporate press release. Actually taking the time to really review a device and give us honest and very thorough information is what I love about this site.I just ordered my X and won't get it for a few days, but I tested all the usual suspects and felt that it was the right phone for me... assuming I can get used to the size.
I know there are a few people that mentioned the GalaxyS family of phones and I have to say that I really wanted to get one... they are slightly smaller in size than the X, but because of their curved shape, they felt even smaller - while still offering a 4" screen. And about that screen, well it did look great, but from all the hype, I was really expecting for it to be even better. Anyways, I really wanted to like the phone - and I was ready to settle on it actually, until I tested the call quality. HUGE let down there... I could barely hear the person on the other end of the phone call, and the speakerphone volume was terrible. Tried this test on more than one version of the GalaxyS and was quite let down.
The Incredible actually had the best sounding speakerphone that I have heard, it was quite loud - but alas I was looking for something a little bigger in size. The X had good volume - much louder than the GalaxyS - so that's the one I picked.
ImmortalZ - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 - link
The gold contacts on the battery door are a staple of Motorola designs since a long time. My old E6 and it's cousin the Z6 both have gold contacts to the battery doors. So does the RAZR line. In fact, I'll go as far as to say that nearly every one of their phones with a metal battery door has multiple contacts from the door to the phone.MacTheSpoon - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 - link
The review was spectacular in many ways, but I couldn't find anything about call quality. Does this thing actually perform well as a phone? Did people you talk to think you sounded good, and did they sound loud and clear to you as well? How did it compare to other phones?Was this info in there somewhere, and I just missed it?