Motorola Droid Bionic (Verizon Wireless)

The Motorola Droid Bionic ($299) is the most powerful Android phone you can buy today, thus it's our Editors' Choice for touch-screen handsets on Verizon Wireless. If you're looking for lightning-fast Internet access, top-notch apps, and unique features, this is your phone. Yeah, sure, something better will always be coming around the corner. But for now, nothing quite matches the dual-core, LTE power of the Droid Bionic—and it transforms into a laptop or a desktop PC.

Physical Features and Voice Calling
Handsome and well built, the Motorola Droid Bionic is big at 2.6 by 5 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and 5.6 ounces. It's solid, and not too thick, with a glossy Gorilla Glass front and a soft-touch back. Like other phones with 4.3-inch screens, it's a pocket-buster, but no more so than Verizon's competing HTC Thunderbolt ($249, 4 stars).

The 960-by-540 4.3-inch, PenTile LCD screen is a bit of a downer. The pixel arrangement makes colored lines look subtly fuzzy. The Samsung Droid Charge's ($299, 4 stars) 800-by-480 Super AMOLED Plus screen looks sharper and brighter, with more-saturated colors and blacker blacks. This shouldn't be a deal-breaker, though; when using the Droid Bionic, the fuzziness only bothered me when I consciously thought about it.

The Motorola Droid Bionic is a CDMA EVDO phone with LTE. It isn't a world phone, but it does work in a few dozen countries such as South Korea, China, and India where CDMA networks exist. The Bionic is a better voice phone than it puts on, because it dramatically under-reports its reception. At signal levels where the Droid Charge showed three bars, the Bionic showed two or one. When the Charge showed one bar, the Bionic showed none. That's with the same signal, mind you—it's just the display bars are calibrated differently.

Voice quality was fine in my tests. The earpiece is of average volume and shows some distortion of loud sounds; there's a nice amount of side-tone. Noise cancellation on outgoing calls is excellent, with almost no background noise coming through on the other end. The speakerphone is extremely loud if tinny; transmissions on the other side are also loud, but muddy. The handset had no problem connecting to several different Bluetooth headsets, and I could easily trigger voice dialing from Bluetooth. The phone had better luck recognizing numbers than names when voice dialing, though. 

The Droid Bionic has better battery life than previous LTE phones like the HTC Thunderbolt, just because it has a large 1735mAh battery. I got 3 hours of continuous LTE streaming on the Bionic compared with 2.5 hours from the Thunderbolt's 1400 mAh battery. I'd expect about 12-14 hours of solid use, once again about 15 percent better than the Thunderbolt. These phones are not power-sippers. Battery life can get much better if you drop to 3G using a free app to switch off LTE, though. I was able to squeeze an impressive 10 hours, 35 minutes of talk time on 3G, one of the best results we've ever seen on a CDMA phone.

Internet
LTE makes Web page load speeds, and other Internet-based applications, much faster than 3G. Verizon already covers 160 million Americans with LTE, and it's announcing new cities every month. In my tests, Web pages loaded more than twice as fast with LTE turned on. Streaming videos from Netflix movies buffered much more quickly, and YouTube videos played in high quality mode much more easily.

You can use the Bionic as a Wi-Fi hotspot for up to five devices, and I was able to achieve excellent speeds of between 7-15Mbps down and 2-3Mbps up. You can multitask phone calls over 3G and data access over 4G, but I was very disappointed to see that, unlike on the HTC Thunderbolt, you can't run simultaneous voice and data over 3G. That makes the Droid Bionic less compelling than the Thunderbolt for 3G-only users.

The flip side of LTE's delightful ease is that it becomes way too easy to bust through Verizon's capped data plans. In just three days of testing with 30 minutes of Netflix, three hours of audio streaming, one email account, some app downloads and some Web browsing, I ripped through 600MB. Unless you're willing to trade LTE for Wi-Fi much of the time, you should look into Verizon's 5GB, $50 data plan instead of its standard $30, 2GB bucket.

Processor, OS, and Apps
The Droid Bionic uses a dual-core 1GHz TI OMAP4430 processor, the same as in the Motorola Droid 3 ($199, 3 stars). Unlike Nvidia and Qualcomm, TI doesn't give suggestions for apps that take advantage of the dual-core processor. The phone benchmarked well, though. Its overall Antutu system benchmark score was faster than any other phone except the Droid 3 thanks to very good results on SD card reads and writes. Its BrowserMark score was the best we've ever seen on a phone; ditto for its NenaMark 2 gaming benchmark score.

In real life, that translates into better gaming frame rates, higher-resolution video streams and about 20-percent-faster Web page loads than on a single-core LTE phone like the Droid Charge. The combination of LTE and dual-core makes this the fastest Web phone in America right now. 

Verizon and Motorola gussy up Android Gingerbread 2.3.4 with Moto's social networking widgets and plenty of bloatware, but none of that drags the phone down. Even Motorola's overly fussy animated screen transitions whisk along smoothly thanks to that dual-core processor. Android purists will be horrified, of course, but ordinary folks won't mind.

Preloaded bloatware, all unable to be deleted, includes Kindle, Blockbuster, Citrix, City ID, GoToMeeting, the Zumocast streaming app, Motorola's Motoprint Wi-Fi printing app, a bunch of V CAST media stores, VideoSurf, which bills itself as a sort of Shazam for videos, and Verizon's VZ Navigator (the Bionic's GPS locked in uncommonly quickly and accurately).

Citrix and GoToMeeting are useful for business, but I don't see why consumers need them. VideoSurf couldn't recognize any videos I had. City ID is useless. Blockbuster is overpriced. Zumocast was great for dragging over documents from my home PC, but videos streamed painfully jerkily, even over LTE.

Fortunately, the phone is also compatible with more than 200,000 Android apps. Netflix is particularly awesome here, YouTube HQ videos stream instantly and beautifully, and I saw good Flash performance in the browser. And then there's Webtop, which demands its own section.

Webtop and Docks
Motorola's Webtop mode transforms the Droid Bionic, like the Motorola Atrix ($99.99, 4 stars) and Motorola Photon ($199, 4.5 stars) before it, into a desktop or laptop computer.

To make the magic work, you need a dock. Motorola's Lapdock, a brainless, handsome 2.4-pound laptop with an 11.6-inch screen and an 8-hour battery, costs $300, but you can get $100 off if you buy it with the Bionic and a $50/month data plan. That's the best all-in-one option, but it's expensive enough that you start making eyes at real netbooks instead.

Desktop docks are cheaper but present their own challenges. Motorola's HD dock costs $99 and supports USB mice and keyboards; a great little Webtop dongle is only $30 but requires you to use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. In any case, you must attach a monitor via HDMI.

Pop the Bionic into the dock, hook up a monitor, and the phone reboots into a desktop version of Ubuntu Linux with only four apps: Firefox 4 (with Flash), Citrix Receiver, a file manager, and Android running in a window. You can run any of your Android apps through the window. The Bionic pops up an on-screen keyboard and trackpad when it's in the dock, but they're pretty unusable; go with a physical keyboard and mouse.

It's easy to get work done in Webtop mode; Google Docs and other business-oriented Web apps work just as you'd expect. But Webtop is slow, so it's a little harder to have fun. Hulu runs at a good frame rate, but videos look pixelated. Kongregate's Flash games run, too, but they tend to be jerky. Ditto for native Android games. I benchmarked the Webtop browser, and it scored a bit lower than the Android browser, showing Webtop's strain on the Bionic's system.

Even though the Bionic has 1GB memory, I ran into a low memory error when running a few Android windows and a few Firefox tabs at the same time. That was disappointing, but manageable.

I'm also intrigued about what Webtop may mean now that Motorola is owned by Google. With its Chrome OS project, Google is heavily pushing Web apps, and a Webtop phone isn't all that far from a Chromebook. I expect to see more weight behind Webtop in the future.

Multimedia
Motorola says the Droid Bionic has 16GB of storage, but the phone itself reports 8GB, plus a 16GB MicroSD card under the back cover. (My 32GB SanDisk card also worked.)

I was disappointed by the Droid Bionic's 8-megapixel still camera, which has a very slow autofocus—up to 2 seconds. That's long enough to miss many shots. The camera lets you take photos before the autofocus has locked in, but then you just get blurry photos. Once you've taken the photos, they turn out to be of average quality, a bit soft and grainy. Video recording works much better, with the Bionic able to capture 1080p video at 30 frames per second in nearly any light condition—apparently, an advantage of the dual-core processor.

The VGA camera on the front captures adequate photos and videos, and works with Google Talk for video chat.

Up here at the high end of the smartphone world we don't expect any problems with music or video playback, and the Bionic can play videos at up to 1080p resolution, including over HDMI, without a hitch. Sound through wired and Bluetooth headphones is impeccable. I wish the phone had a kickstand, as the phone's own speaker is on the back and ends up muffled if the phone is sitting on a table. If you spend a lot of time watching video, you will want to pony up for a kickstand case or a dock.

Conclusions
The Motorola Droid Bionic is the most powerful phone for Verizon. It sets the bar for Android performance, offering  faster Web page loads and better battery life than any other LTE phone so far, so it's an easy Editors' Choice.

Verizon's LTE network is expanding so quickly that we strongly suggest buying an LTE smartphone if you're shopping on Verizon. Is the Bionic worth $50 more than the HTC Thunderbolt, though? I'd say yes on points, but not for everyone. The Thunderbolt offers simultaneous voice and data on 3G and none of the PenTile LCD fuzziness. The Bionic is faster with better battery life, Web page loads, and Webtop apps. And, more importantly, $50 is nothing compared to the $2,400-plus you're likely to spend feeding Verizon's meter over two years.

If the Droid Bionic's price makes you quiver, look at the Motorola Photon 4G on Sprint and the T-Mobile MyTouch 4G Slide ($199, 4.5 stars) on T-Mobile instead. The Photon is extremely similar to the Bionic, but with lower monthly fees on Sprint. The MyTouch 4G Slide is also about as powerful, with T-Mobile's lower monthly fees.

One more thing. There is an imaginary dream phone called the "Nexus Prime" that many people online talk about. Maybe it's coming for Verizon. Should you wait for it? There's no way of knowing; as we found with the Bionic, it may be many months before it appears, and it may not perform the way you think it should. You can only make decisions based on what's on the market now. Something better will always come along within six months. That's the excitement of the smartphone world, and one of its curses.

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