Motorola Droid X Cell Phone Review

Additional Features

The Bluetooth in the Droid X worked perfectly in our tests. It paired easily with several headsets and hands-free devices. Best of all is that you can do voice dialing over Bluetooth with the Droid X, a feature that was missing on the Droid and Droid Incredible.

The Droid X has another unusual and useful feature. It can be a Wi-Fi hotspot for up to five devices. It works as a WPA2-protected, 802.11g Wi-Fi hotspot. You simply tap on the 3G Mobile Hotspot app, which is shown in the top left of Figure 15, to turn on this feature.

Figure15: The 3G Mobile Hotspot app

This app uses a lot of battery power, so Verizon recommends that you keep the phone plugged in when using it. Also, there is an extra cost over the standard data plan for use of this feature. Yet, for some this is a great feature.

Everything about the Droid is big, including the large 1570 mAh battery. For a cell phone with such a large screen, battery life was good. We were able to get through an entire day of average use. However, using the location feature for driving directions will drain the battery after 4 or 5 hours. So if you plan on using the Droid X as a GPS in the car, be sure to purchase a car battery charger.

You can purchase an even larger 1930 mAh extended battery as an add-on accessory. There is also a very nice app available that turns the Droid X into a device similar to a clock radio.

We also noted that this Droid gets quite warm in heavy use. It is not really hot to the touch, but you will notice the heat that it gives off if you use it constantly.

The Droid X has a single interface to sign into several different kinds of accounts like Google, Yahoo! Mail, Microsoft Exchange, and other mail services. It also includes access to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other social networking services. There are several apps that can be used to push and to congregate these networking services.

Google and Exchange calendars are easily integrated into your Droid calendar. Your address book can include friends from social network services, if you like. Thankfully, you can just select one of your phone books, if your combined friends list becomes too overwhelming.

Web browsing is a joy on the Droid X’s large screen. It supports pinch-to-zoom, but you don’t have to do as much moving around as you do on a smaller screen. When Flash 10 is added, the browsing experience will be even better.

The Droid X has all the bells and whistles that you would expect from a really smart phone, including text messaging, MMS, DLNA, speed dial, caller ID, automatic redial, call waiting, conference calling, downloadable and preloaded ringtones, wallpaper, and hearing aid compatibility.