Verizon Wireless' Motorola Droid X2 is on sale now. The qHD screen and other UI improvements are nice perks, but not enough to sway users in a time of 4G LTE Android smartphones.
Verizon
Wireless (NYSE:VZW) began
selling the Motorola Droid X2 smartphone online
May 19 for $199.99, with the Android 2.2-based follow-up to the smash-hit Droid
X from last July readily available in Verizon retail stores May 26.
That's
tomorrow, folks. I've been using the Droid X as my personal smartphone since
November. Rather than comparing the device to other Droids or Samsung Galaxy
devices on the market, I'm going to stick to the Droid X comparisons, which are
many.
From a
hardware perspective, the Droid X2 is largely the same. See the
side-by-side comparison for yourself. Not only
does the X2 measure 5 inches long, 2.6 inches wide and only 0.38 inches thick,
it weighs the same as the X, just under 5.5 ounces. The X2 also has the same
physical input buttons below the pretty screen.
Yes, the
screen is "pretty." Why? It's actually one of two major modifications
from the original Droid X. This candy bar form factor "Froyo"
smartphone uses a quarter-high-definition display with 960 by 540 resolution.
Motorola
claims the X2 has 26 percent more pixels than the
Droid X. That sounds about right; I could certainly see a difference, but only
when the X and X2 were placed side by side, showing the virtual keyboard or
YouTube videos.
The difference
was especially notable in lighter settings, as the Corning Gorilla Glass
offered protection from light reflection, which tends to cloud what you can see
on the screen. The qHD is a nice improvement, but not earthshaking. Call it an
incremental improvement to the naked eye.
The software
on both the X and X2 is, at present, largely the same. Both run Froyo. The X
launched with Android 2.1, and got the Froyo bump late last year. The X2
launches with Froyo, but will get the Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" bump
later this year. But this phone lacks the requisite NFC (near-field
communication) chip, so don't expect to do mobile payments with your Droid X2.
The user
interface of the X and X2 were different, if only in slight nuances as far as
smartphones go. I'm talking in particular about the color scheme, which is
largely blue on the X2, as you can see from the native Droid X wallpaper that
loads up when you power on the phone. Where the dialer on the X is a drab gray,
the X2 dialer has a nice blue hue.
I thought this
was a freak thing, but then I discovered similar blue tinges in the camera
software UI. Yes, more or less the same 8MP camera from the X is here on the
X2, sporting 720p video recording, dual-LED flash and auto-focus.
However, the
X2 camera software offers the ability to zoom in or out on the virtual
viewfinder, saving us from the clunkiness of buttons. Motorola also claimed the
X2 camera boasts 44 percent faster shot-to-shot performance. I didn't notice
that much difference. The Droid cameras still stutter.
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