Motorola Droid X Cell Phone Review

Multimedia and Camera

The Droid X has 8 GB of built-in memory and comes with a 16 GB microSD card, so you can store a lot of music, videos, and pictures.

The speakers on the Droid X are good and are loud enough to be used for nearby listening. The phone plays AAC, MP3, WMA and WAV music files. The stereo music sounds good through either wired or Bluetooth headphones.

You can attach the Droid X to your computer and drag and drop media files to and from the cell phone, but to get the use of playlists, album covers, and the like, you will want to use Verizon’s free VCAST Media Manager. While we have used this Media Manager before, when we tried to download it to our Windows 7 64-bit computer we were told that it would only work on 32-bit computers. Since 64-bit computers have been in the public sales channel for over two years, Verizon is really behind on this one.

The Droid also has an FM radio with 15 presets. You must use headphones to listen to the FM radio, since they act as the antenna.

We really liked the Droid X’s eight-megapixel camera. Daylight shots were crisp and c
lear. The built-in flash could be a little stronger, as low-light photos were a little dark. But overall, the photos were some of the best that we’ve seen on a cell phone. The phone has eight scene modes, including a macro mode, and also eight effects. The camera roll appears as a unique rolling slide-show, shown in Figure 14. You can easily tag and/or share photos right from the camera roll, but there is only minimal built-in editing, like cropping, rotating, and geo-tagging.

Figure 14: The camera roll

The Droid X captures 720p video at 24 frames per second. These also looked quite good. You can post your videos directly to YouTube from the phone. There is even a video tutorial that you can watch right from the Droid’s preinstalled “Help” app. Other useful help videos are also available. The Droid X has a mini-HDMI port that can be used to show your pictures and videos on your television. There is a Blockbuster app, but at the time of our review, downloading Blockbuster movies was both pricey and time-consuming.