Motorola Droid 3 Cell Phone Review

Using the Droid 3

The Droid 3 is a 3G phone. This means slower data transfer, but it also means better battery life. The Droid 3’s 1540 mAh Li Ion battery is rated for 550 minutes of continuous talk time and up to 300 hours of standby time. The Droid 3 easily got us through a day of average use.

Although it does not support 4G LTE, it does have the advantage of being a world phone with SIM card included. Figure 8 shows the back of the phone with the cover removed where you can see the battery and the SIM card. A slot for a microSD card up to 32 GB is just below the SIM card. Unlike some of its Droid predecessors, there is no microSD card included with the Droid 3. It does, however, have internal storage of 16 GB.

The Droid 3 uses a dual-mode technology so that it runs on Verizon’s CDMA/EV-DO Rev. A network in the US, but will automatically switch to a GSM network when overseas.

Figure 8: The open back

The Droid 3 runs on a 1 GHz Texas Instrument OMAP 4430 dual-core processor with 512 MB of RAM.

The dual-core processor produces better graphics rendering than some
older Droids with single-core processors. This is especially noticeable when playing games and when you attach the phone to an HDTV for video output. As noted earlier, the HDMI port works in a mirror mode, so you can use an HDTV to display whatever you see on the phone’s screen.

Our Droid 3 came with Gingerbread preinstalled. This is the most current version of the Android operating system, and it adds some excellent functionality to this phone. You can tell at a glance that Gingerbread is installed by looking at the main screen which is shown in Figure 9. The two rows of icons on the bottom are one of the features of Gingerbread, as is the square (all apps) icon at the lower right.

Gingerbread brings with it many enhancements that the user will notice such as better word selection, copy and paste implementation, enhancements to the camera and music applications, and a simplified visual theme.

There are also behind-the-scenes enhancements like improved power management, a native application manager, and an improved download manager. As you can also see in Figure 9, the Droid 3 comes with a data usage widget, a help app, and a guided tour video, all of which will be beneficial to a new user.

Figure 9: The Droid 3 home screen

With the dual-core processor, responsive screen, and Gingerbread operating system, the Droid 3 is a pleasure to use. We found it to be fast and responsive with no glitches.

Call quality in our tests was excellent, and the speaker phone was loud enough to be useful. This phone has dual microphones with noise reduction which helped reduce superfluous noise.

While some other Motorola phones required a Motoblur account, the Droid 3 did not force us to do that. In fact, Motorola’s Motoblur overlay was not as obvious in this phone, which to us, was a good thing.