Motorola Droid Pro Cell Phone Review

The Hardware

The Droid Pro’s QWERTY keyboard can be seen under the screen in Figure 5. The keyboard, in fact, is similar in size to many BlackBerry keyboards, but at 3.1″, the display screen is larger than most similar BlackBerry’s and the screen is a touch screen.

You will also notice in Figure 5, that the bezel of the screen has the four soft touch buttons that have come to symbolize the Android operating system, Menu, Home, Back, and Search. While we expected these on-screen buttons to be lit while using the phone, there we occasions during use when they turned off and could not be seen when we wanted to use them. Since the lighting of these soft touch buttons was tied to the backlighting of the keyboard, they could be turned back on by touching the keyboard. However, it was counter-intuitive and aggravating to have to touch the keyboard to light the on-screen keys.

Figure 5: The front of the Droid Pro

The Droid Pro’s 3.1-inch TFT LCD touchscreen has a fairly low resolution of only 320 x 480 pixels. Although the screen can’t compare to the Retina Display of the iPhone or the Super AMOLED display of the Samsung Galaxy phone, it is quite useable, even videos looked surprisingly good. Colors are vibrant and the screen has good viewing angels from all directions. Still, if you have used a phone with a better screen, you will notice some jagged edges and areas where it lacks clarity.

While we expected to be disappointed in the screen’s resolution, this was not a deal breaker for us. However, we were disappointed with the response of the touch screen. There were times when we had to press multiple times to get the unit to respond. The haptic feedback works for some functions, but not for others. We also had trouble with multi-touch gestures, like pinching and zooming.

The 4-row, 35-button keyboard, shown in Figure 6, is very useable. The keys are backlit and clearly marked. There is no space between the keys, so they seem a bit cramped, but as you can see in Figure 6, each key is angled so there is a nice definition between the keys. The F and J keys have raised place markers just as they would on a full sized keyboard. There is a dedicated @ key and a dedicated key for using the voice commands. You can use it to say things like “directions to,” “send email,” “call,” etc.

Figure 6: The keypad

The autocorrect and word suggestions that are built into the Android operating system work quite well, so your typing doesn’t have to be perfect.

There is obviously no need for an on-screen keyboard when the phone is in vertical mode. When input is needed in horizontal mode a useful onscreen keyboard appears. The only thing that we missed was the ability to use Swype with this keyboard, a feature that we have fallen in love with. This, however, given the physical keyboard, is fairly unimportant.