Motorola Droid X (Short Review)

The Droid X is the latest module in a curious outgrowth of smartphone evolution. An industrial slab as vast and barren as a desert planet, it revels in being the most colossal thing that could possibly be called a phone, stretching categorical credulity—and pocket fabric.


The Droid X is even more mondo than the other Android phone of epic proportions—HTC's Evo, also a juiced-up technical demonstration of how much fancy silicon can be stuffed inside of a phone. The ice scraper-cum-phone is hardware unabashedly designed to provoke the most raging nerd boner possible: 4.3-inch 854x480 screen (slightly higher res than the Evo's 4.3-inch screen), 1GHz TI OMAP processor (a methed-out rendition of the chip inside the original Droid and Palm Pre), 512MB RAM, 24GB storage, 8-megapixel stills, 720p HD video, DLNA compatibility w/ HDMI Micro out, three mics for noise cancellation and wireless N with 3G hotspot powers.

The software—a discordant melange of the not-so-fresh Android 2.1 and various bits of the Blur "social networking" interface from Motorola's lower-end Android phones—is the shudder-inducing poster child for the horrors that can occur when most hardware companies try to make software. It's ugly, scattershot, and confusing. It feels almost malicious.


The creeping feeling that Android is the new Windows becomes an overwhelming sensation the first time you boot up Droid X. Seven sprawling desktop screens, littered with widgets, oodles of little programs—the vast majority of which you probably don't want or need. It's overwhelming and utterly incomprehensible if you're not the kind of person who's seen at least two non-JJ Abrams Star Trek movies. The minutes lost to clearing them to get to a reasonably clean desktop, one press-and-hold-and-swipe gesture at a time, brought me back to the sullen days of removing crapware from whiny relatives' Sony Vaios. Breathtaking hardware, filled to the brim with crap. Why would Motorola make this the first impression of its phone? Stuttering and confusion?

As soon as you dive into the bits that Motorola aims to seriously augment—the social networking aspects from its Blur interface, things gets really messy. Droid X comes with its own accounts and contacts system for Twitter, Facebook, Picasa, Exchange, MySpace, and more, that all resides on the phone. The idea is that you can update your status for every network simultaneously and keep track of all your friends, across every possible service, using Motorola's widgets and contacts system. While it offers more services, it doesn't work nearly as seamlessly as Android's native apps for Facebook and Twitter. The whole setup feels more like an elegant hack. And God help you if cross streams between Android's official Facebook/Twitter apps and Motorola's. We've reached the point where custom interfaces on top of Android really don't do anything better than Google does. They're almost universally worse.


Software kneecaps this phone at nearly every corner. It makes the sizzling hardware look bad in the process. Watching this phone sputter, which it does occasionally for the even most menial of tasks, like opening the apps menu, feels more egregiously tortuous than normal, given its prodigious size and weight. It's brain-stabbingly maddening if you actually knowwhat's inside of all that. (Verizon and Motorola would no doubt like me to you remind the build I've been using is not quite final, so performance could improve, but it seems like a systemic issue with Android 2.1. Android 2.2, with its massive speed boost and other perks, won't be available for this phone until "late summer.")

The camera app, while it has an impressive range of options and scenes and modes, can be ridiculously slow to actually snap photos, on top of the dragged-down-gravel UI. (Try starting up the app with the camera button. "Is it being slow, or did it register?" is a popular game.) The shutter feedback it gives is poor too, so when I shot the Droid X alongside the iPhone for a day, I wound up reshooting most of the Droid X's photos at least once. Focusing was a constant battle—it'd have something in focus, and then lose it. (As you might notice in the sample gallery. Also, all photos taken from same position as other comparison cameras—the differences in perspective illustrate the difference camera lenses.) Also,the camera quality is pretty soundly trounced by the iPhone 4—both photos and video—which might be the most disappointing aspect of the hardware. (It's possible a software fix could make things wildly better, as they did for the original Droid.)

The sole brownie point for Moto's interface work is the keyboard. It's the best Android keyboard yet, because it's on an effing giant screen, and it's truly multitouch. It's also the one bit of design here that's relatively clean, if unattractive. (If you don't like it, the Swype system is built in as well, but most people will stumble over it like buried treasure, since it's tucked under a contextual menu for input method.) Less successful is its attempt at an iPhone-style magnifying glass for text selection. Nailing the careful balance between triggering the magnifier and Android's system menu for text is half skill and half luck.

We've come to a strange little place with Android, and maybe with non-iPhone smartphones in general. For the first year or two after the iPhone, most phones wanted to be just like it. Now, it seems like they're running away from it, to remold themselves into something as un-iPhone-like as possible. The Droid X is at the X-treme end of that spectrum. But it's not any better for it.