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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
84 Comments
View All Comments
7amood - Saturday, July 30, 2011 - link
that's nice to hearplease don't forget to talk about the screen problem
http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s_ii_displa...
It's really hard to accept that my perfect SUPER AMOLED is not perfect.
It's harder to accept the fact that samsung don't give a f*** about me since they already have my money.
takumsawsherman - Saturday, July 30, 2011 - link
On the GL benchmark, it shows iPhone 3GS running faster than iPhone 4. Is this correct? If so, why do you think iPhone 4 is performing worse on the test?Ryan Smith - Sunday, July 31, 2011 - link
GLBench runs at the device's native resolution. The iPhone 4 is 4x the resolution of the 3GS.Lucian Armasu - Sunday, July 31, 2011 - link
It looks like OMAP is on the way out from the market, though:http://semiaccurate.com/2011/07/29/texas-instrumen...
Now the fight will be left between Nvidia, Qualcomm and Samsung.
martyrant - Sunday, July 31, 2011 - link
My VP wanted one, so we both got one the same day. I don't talk on the phone as much, but after a week I did a conference call on it and it drained it from 80% to 15% in under an hour. I also just left it on a charger last night, saw it go from 30-90%, went to bed, got up and just checked it (while still plugged into the charger) and it's back at 30%. Did you see any strange anomalies when running your battery life tests? My VP loves the phone, but hates the battery--his dies all the time and so does mine. It seems like while your tests look awesome, the real life performance of this phone is nowhere near in line with those tests when it comes to battery. I have tried max battery saver, just about everything---had to get the VP an extended battery pack and he still doesn't know if he can continue to use this phone because of the battery issues.martyrant - Sunday, July 31, 2011 - link
It went to 20% from 30% while writing that comment, while plugged into the charger. Hot, right?josby - Sunday, July 31, 2011 - link
Same here. I bought mine the day they were released in stores, but I've been anxiously awaiting the AnandTech review of it because I knew it would include battery life comparisons. I came from a T-Mobile G2 (running Cyanogen7) and have all the same apps, with the same update intervals set, on my Droid3 as I had on the G2, yet the battery life is very noticeably worse. It can barely make it from morning til night even with very light usage.In fact, I always left my G2's wifi on, yet the Droid3 still doesn't last as long even if I leave wifi off.
Yet, the G2 does considerably worse than the Droid3 in the battery life tests in this review.
Brian Klug - Sunday, July 31, 2011 - link
That's odd - I wonder what kind of signal environment he was in when he made that call. Could you find out what Rx signal strength was in dBm?The only part of the entire cellular architecture that has a power control loop is the phone->base station, and when you're in a low signal environment the phone can increase Tx power to be "heard" by the base station and thus hurt battery life considerably. We always test in areas with at least -75 dBm or better.
-Brian
photoguru - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link
I had major problems with my battery life until I realised that the power adapter for the Droid 3 requires 5.1v at 850mA which is quite a bit higher than most chargers. Mine actually died while browsing the web and being plugged into a Belkin usb charger.Also, theres an issue with programs not turning off once you exit them. Task killers should fix it but I actually just went through the programs and manually adjusted which ones can continue to run in the background. Now my battery lasts almost twice as long as it did before, and quite a bit longer than my droid 1 and droid 2 global.
anandtech pirate - Sunday, July 31, 2011 - link
how about the Evo3D?