Motorola Droid X: Thoroughly Reviewed
by Brian Klug on July 20, 2010 4:27 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Motorola Droid X
- OMAP
- Mobile
Hotspot Use
The EVO’s has more eye candy but really no additional functionality. It’ll be interesting to see how HTC and Motorola integrate the WiFi tethering features from froyo into their platforms. For an extra $20/month, the X will allow up to 5 devices to connect, with a 2 GB per month cap. The EVO allows 8 users to connect.
I decided we needed to do some real-world hotspot testing and find out what battery life really looks like. To do so, I loaded up four tabs of our page loading suite which loads through a set of more than a dozen pages every 20 seconds. Two tabs with 1-4 flash ads, two tabs with no flash ads. I also fired up a 64 kilobit/s streaming radio station. All of this was on one wireless client in the same room. The screen is off, and any other background applications were killed before launch.
It’s a heavy load, but not unlike what you could potentially see in the real world. I also tested my Nexus One, but had some instability and lost connection before the test completed. After tweaking my setup, I got some numbers.
We see that the EVO and X alike have very similar tethering lifetime. I noticed that the EVO’s wireless range was notably less, however. Looking at the numbers, it seems possible that Android's native implementation in Froyo offers a small but notable battery life benefit.
When I tested the original Droid, I was shocked by the long call time battery life. True to form, the X also has impressively long CDMA talk time. For being a big phone, the X also pulls some impressive other battery numbers thanks to being the second device on the market with a 45 nm process SoC.
The results are definitely interesting - the X has the longest battery life among devices running Android 2.1.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
89 Comments
View All Comments
TareX - Thursday, July 22, 2010 - link
Why are all the Samsung Galaxy S phones missing from your charts and comparisons? I wanted to see how Hummingbird compared and how the Super AMOLED fared against their Droid X counterparts...strikeback03 - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 - link
Maybe because the first US version launched a day before the review went up, and they weren't sent a review sample.enealDC - Thursday, July 22, 2010 - link
Great job!Juniper Research - Friday, July 23, 2010 - link
Very interesting article... we have this week published a new report on smartphones and a free whitepaper is available to download here... http://www.juniperresearch.com/reports/next_genera...John Levett
Marketing Executive at Juniper Research
Homefries - Saturday, July 24, 2010 - link
First off, great review Brian.However, while you did a very thorough comparison of the Droid X to other Android devices, you barely mentioned the real competitor the Droid X has to stand up against: the iPhone 4.
Readers want to know if the Droid X is the best phone on the market - the whole market - not just the market subset dedicated to Android devices.
Like the majority of the tech media, your review furthers the notion readers belong exclusively to either the iOS camp or the Andriod camp. This is simply not true. Informed readers, like the ones that peruse Anandtech, want to buy one smartphone, regardless of any marketing slants, that is the best.
Your review of the Droid X should have helped us answer the question, "Should I buy the Droid X or the iPhone 4?" But, it did not.
strikeback03 - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 - link
Well, I think the conclusion in the iPhone article and some earlier Android articles applies, there is no "best" for everyone. Some people love Apple and the Apple way of life, some people won't touch it. As the iPhone is currently limited to AT&T, that is going to deter a lot of people. How large a pocket/bag you plan on carrying the phone in might make size differences more important to some than others. So while I am not one of the readers calling for no subjective opinions (it is interesting that FroYo feels significantly faster/different) I think it is still up to each buyer to decide what is most important to them.Electrofreak - Saturday, July 24, 2010 - link
Brian and Anand, are you sure you're using the correct information regarding the SoC in the Droid X? I believe it is a OMAP 3640, not a 3630, as the maximum recommended clock speed of the 3630 is described in numerous places across the net as being 720 MHz, while the max clock speed of the 3640 is described as 1 GHz. In addition, the max recommended clock speed of the 3430 in the Droid was 600 MHz, not 800.The information I cite above is widely available across the web... if you've got inside information the rest of us don't have, by all means let us know. But as someone who has written articles of my own on ARM SoCs and follows ARM industry news closely, I suspect that your data may not be 100% correct.
Regardless, I do have to thank you for writing some of the most informative hardware articles on the net. I appreciate it!
Electrofreak - Saturday, July 24, 2010 - link
...and I just found this: http://e2e.ti.com/blogs_/b/mobile_momentum/archive...So, per TI's blog it is the 3630... now we just need an explanation of the other info on the web that describes the 3630 as maxing out at 720 MHz.
Brian Klug - Monday, July 26, 2010 - link
Yeah, TI's documentation is a bit outdated. Anand tackled the SoC part, but the 3630 is indeed a 1 GHz part, it isn't the 3640 guaranteed. There was a lot of confusion online about it, but Anand got the official word. ;)I agree, back when I did my other OMAP 3 piece it was 720 MHz.
-Brian
Electrofreak - Saturday, July 24, 2010 - link
Looking forward to that Hummingbird review Brian. I hope you're able to dig up some info that I wasn't able to when I wrote my article (http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?p=17125) back in April.