Motorola Droid 3 Review - Third Time's a Charm
by Brian Klug on July 30, 2011 12:01 AM ESTDroid 3 Car Dock Accessory
Before we leave the subject of superficial hardware impressions and the exterior, I want to mention something else. Motorola did something interesting and sent along the official Droid 3 car dock accessory. I’m familiar with the Droid 1 and 2 car docks, with a friend of mine owning and using one daily.
The Droid 3 car dock is changed but only slightly, with a larger form factor designed to accommodate the Droid 3’s heftier size. I like that the car charger consists of two pieces. By default, the dock is slightly oversized to accommodate a Droid 3 and reasonably sized case, and a plastic tray that fits inside to then accommodate a Droid 3, sans case.
Like other docks, the Droid 3 car dock uses a suction cup to stay attached to a surface, in this case ideally a glass surface. As smartphone editor, to say that I’ve tried a wide gamut of smartphone car mounts is an understatement. Like most suction cup based mounts, the official Droid 3 model really does need a surface with the level of smoothness only glass can provide to stay attached. Odds are that your dashboard won’t be sufficiently smooth enough to keep the mount suctioned on. The smartphone slides in, and a top spring loaded latch locks down on the device to hold it in place.
There’s a microUSB connection on the back side of the car dock into which a car charger plugs. The dock pivots on a ball which can be tightened. Again, I was impressed with the weight and balance of the car dock, which makes it very stable when attached to a windshield. I have a variety of accessory socket chargers, but ordered the official Motorola accessory socket USB charger just to see whether anything differs. I’m happy that the day of accessories being locked to specific manufacturers is long over.
As always, mounts that are specifically designed to a particular product fare better, and the Droid 3’s is no exception. The whole apparatus is nicely balanced and dampened with enough mass that the device doesn’t shudder or shake violently at any road speed or condition. I drove around town in my truck at surface street speed and on the interstate at 80 MPH with the Droid 3 in the mount and came away impressed.
The device docks inside and makes a microUSB connection with the base, which has some signaling that also launches the car mode in the device. From here, one can access some quick shortcuts including four custom applications, some call functionality, and a simple navigational map. The map shows current speed and optionally direction, but doesn’t offer much more functionality beyond simply a map and current position indicator. For navigation, one has to actually use Google navigation instead. It’s possible to exit the car mode software, but all roads do tend to lead to it afterward while docked.
There’s not much more to comment about the dock other than that it nicely accommodates the Droid 3. It would be nice if Motorola shipped a microUSB charger along with the dock, as the device essentially needs one for the dock to be useful. At $39.99 as of this writing, the dock is a bit expensive but admittedly priced around what I’m used to for mounts that don’t end up feeling cheap and vibrating endlessly. The other options are generic solutions that adjust to fit, or other custom solutions for specific vehicles.
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anandtech pirate - Sunday, July 31, 2011 - link
hmm, I was thinking about the Sensation vs. Evo3D, one has 768mb of ram while the other has 1GB or ram. The sensation suffers from noticeable lag on the homescreen where as the Evo3D is much smoother. this might be a sense 3.0 problem though as it's a resource hog.themossie - Sunday, July 31, 2011 - link
The extra RAM makes a huge difference when it comes to multitasking.With my Droid 1 the home screen always reloads when I leave an application, and true multitasking is impossible as I can't keep multiple applications in memory.
Droid 1 is significantly hampered by 256 MB. Droid 2 has 512 MB. Droid 3 should have more. Most of the Many competitive phones have 768 MB+ - (offhand the Droid Incredible 2 and MyTouch 4g) or 1 gb (Evo 3D, Atrix 4G) and RAM is cheap...
512 is acceptable now, but don't think in terms of today - what will the minimum requirements be to run Android in 1 year? 2 years?
Reikon - Sunday, July 31, 2011 - link
I was wondering about the Evo 3d review too. Didn't Brian say it was supposed to be out weeks ago?mike8675309 - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
I agree... More memory. The dual core Moto Atrix comes with 1gig of RAM. Verizon has been notoriously stingy with RAM in the phones they deliver.bishless - Saturday, July 30, 2011 - link
I saw "Wetmore" in the maps screenshot and instantly thought, "Holy crap, this writer is in Tucson!"... I looked a little closer and saw Ruthraff and felt proud enough to reveal my detective skills in the article comments... Then a couple pages later, there's the weather widget obviously displaying "Tucson". Heh.So much for detective work.
I see you're aware of Cartel Coffee Lab... we ought to meet for coffee sometime!
Brian Klug - Saturday, July 30, 2011 - link
Yeah, always been here in Tucson ;)I hang out at Cartel a lot, absolutely!
-Brian
GotnoRice - Saturday, July 30, 2011 - link
While having numbers on top is sort of nice, they failed hard when it comes to the most basic element- the orientation of the QWERTY keysLook down at the keyboard right in front of you. The "S" key in the middle row should be directly above the gap between the "Z" and "X" keys. It should straddle the gap between those keys almost perfectly.
Yet on the Droid 3 the "S" key is almost DIRECTLY on top of the "X" key. Simply put, the rows are misaligned.
The reason people like a QWERTY keyboard is because it's a layout they are already familiar. That fact is incompatible with the idea of randomly adjusting the rows in relation to each other as if it's arbitrary; it's not.
They got this mostly right with the Droid 2 keyboard, how did they get it so wrong with the Droid 3?
Pete_ - Saturday, July 30, 2011 - link
Check your facts: the Tegra 2 chipset does not support LPDDR2 (333/266 MHz) and is limited to only 133 MHz DDR. I've owned the DX2 and returned it for the Droid 3... proof is in the pudding.Brian Klug - Saturday, July 30, 2011 - link
Hmm, I'm not sure about that: http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-2.html then look under Memory Frequency.We've independently confirmed a few times them using LPDDR2-600, for example on the Optimus 2X.
ol1bit - Saturday, July 30, 2011 - link
I'm glad you posted so many photos, but the blue tint on the flash enabled photo is terrible.Even the video has a tad of blue tint compared with the Cannon.
I wonder if they will do an update to fix that with this phone, or if this is just a jump step phone with no marketing, just to keep money flowing in till the Bionic comes out?