Motorola Droid Bionic Review - Dual Core with 4G LTE
by Brian Klug on October 11, 2011 1:55 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- LTE
- Motorola
- OMAP 4
- Mobile
- motorola droid bionic
Display - qHD 4.3"
I went over this in our preview piece, but the Bionic literally uses the same display as the Droid X2. It’s a 4.3" qHD (960 x 540) panel with an RGBW PenTile subpixel matrix. The goal of PenTile in RGBW is to affect more light throughput at a given backlight brightness than a traditional RGB stripe. It seems simple enough in theory - R, G, and B filters in an LCD all incur losses, and having a white subpixel is an easy way to increase total throughput with a lower backlight level. Luminance gets mapped to the white subpixel, chrominance gets mapped to RGB, and in theory you get the same image with fewer incurred losses, and can drive the panel with less backlight power.
RGBW PenTile on the Motorola Droid Bionic
The side effect is that, like RGBG PenTile which we saw in Samsung’s AMOLED and SAMOLED, the grid is offset and thus renders vertical elements in a unique fuzzy manner. From far away enough, those offset elements look relatively homogenous or straight, but up close is where you can notice things aren’t a nice, straight grid. In other terms, instead of 3 subpixels per pixel in a normal RGB stripe, RBGW PenTile uses 2 subpixels per pixel. Nouvoyance also explains all of this on their own RGBW page.
I have to admit that I found RGBG PenTile distracting, but RGBW PenTile not nearly as much on these newer devices. Maybe I’ve just gotten used to it from seeing it crop up so many times now. It’s more noticeable on the Droid X2 and Bionic purely because the logical pixels are larger - same resolution, larger display (4.3“ as opposed to 4.0”), however.
Motorola earned something of a reputation for including good IPS displays in the original Droid all the way through the Droid 2. PenTile or not, the display does post good brightness and contrast numbers in our measurements with an i1D2 as always.
I also measured display brightness and white point as a function of brightness selected from the settings menu. This is something we’ve been doing for a while now, and it’s actually pretty cool to see the Bionic’s lines pretty much lie right atop the X2’s - for once, everything does make sense. Viewing angles and outdoor viewing quality is basically identical to what I saw on the X2, which is to say pretty darn good.
I like the Bionic’s display if nothing else because it’s qHD, even if this display is effective qHD resolution through RGBW PenTile rather than an RGB stripe. Higher dot pitch through any means necessary is something I’m ok with, and there are just so many places that qHD gives more breathing room than WVGA in Android.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
64 Comments
View All Comments
jonup - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - link
It's actually leads to factual mistatement.On page 2 bellow the browsing battary life graph "2.236" should be "3.236".
Take care!
Brian Klug - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - link
Very good catch, fixed! Thanks!-Brian
Someguyperson - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - link
"There’s a grille to the side of this which serves no real purpose that I can tell other than decoration."- If I do recall, that's for the speakerphone.
"I went ahead and measured with a DMM just to make sure, though you can simply just look at the battery information page in ##4636## and see the same voltage at fully charged."
- You're thinking of *#*#4636#*#*
Someguyperson - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - link
Forget the speaker comment. You didn't mention the obviously placed speakerphone and I thought you were talking about that.I do believe you can lock a handset into a specific mode of operation through the *#*#4636#*#* operation if you want pure LTE testing though. It's under the "Phone information" menu at the bottom. In my experience, you can even try to lock the handset into modes it doesn't have.
Brian Klug - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - link
I'm actually referring to another menu in the case of the Bionic. Using the *#*#4636#*#* menu here doesn't work if the RIL isn't setup properly, as is what seems to be the case here. (EG the only options are the defaults, GSM/CDMA Auto (PRL) is selected by default, and there are no references to LTE at all).There's another menu inside ##PROGRAM (then enter SPC 000000), Test mode, keep going next page until you arrive at a page with many drop down options, select Network mode: "LTE only" like so:
http://imgur.com/a/C8noI
Unfortunately, if you do that, you lose 1x voice, so be careful.
-Brian
sotoa - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - link
Thanks for the review. I couldn't wait for the Bionic (due to delays), but I'm really happy with my Droid 3 and glad that these are very similar. No loss for me there!I'm bummed about the audio issues though. Music is just not loud weather using the headphones or the speaker. The original Droid was so much louder.
rscoot - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - link
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/4910/Bionic-About...This picture shows the number for the handset, you might want to edit that out!
Brian Klug - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - link
Well, at least for the demo phone that will be sent back, haha ;)Thanks for pointing that out though.
-Brian
Aikouka - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - link
One thing that's been on my mind in regard to LTE power draw is whether or not there's a parallel that can be made to CPUs. Similar to how they say a faster CPU that draws slightly more power will finish a task faster, is it possible to state that a LTE-equipped phone will finish loading web content significantly faster (not hard task compared to Verizon's EVDO), and it can return to a low-powered state? I know on my normal 3G (GSM) connection, if I'm watching a video on YouTube, it's going to be sitting there continuously loading for at least a minute, and the battery life definitely takes a hit for constantly accessing the modem.rrhartjr - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - link
You know.. I don't think I've ever seen anyone make this point.. and I think it's pretty prescient.The converse is that since it loads faster.. you'll just consume more, faster..
How many times have you given up waiting on something over EVDO and going to do something else. With LTE, the end of waiting!