Using Basic Features
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Call quality on the Droid Charge was good. It has the usual set of voice features including speed dial, voice commands, conference calling, a speakerphone, and text and MMS (multimedia messaging). The speakerphone was loud enough for use in an average environment, but noise cancellation of background noises was only average.
The Droid Charge has Bluetooth, WiFi b/g/n, and GPS, including good voice navigation. The front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera can be used for video calls, but the phone comes with no video chat clients, so you will have to download an app from the Android Market for video calling. This is a little disturbing since the phone comes preloaded with apps. In fact, there are three pages of apps on the phone when it comes out of the box. These include apps like Kindle, Bitbop, Blockbuster, CityID, Guided Tours, Let’s Golf, My Verizon, Rock Band, ThinkFree Office, TuneWiki, VCast, and VZ Navigator. We liked the fact that there were apps already for us to try, but were aggravated because some of these apps couldn’t be removed. Once the phone is ours, we would like to have full control over which apps are installed.
Media streaming and web surfing on Verizon’s LTE 4G network were, as on the Thunderbolt, quite speedy. Verizon promises average download speeds of 5 Mbps to 12 Mbps and upload speeds of 2 Mbps to 5 Mbps, and it didn’t disappoint. The Droid Charge supports Flash, and web pages appeared quickly. Even though the screen is small, watching videos and movies on its brilliant display can be addictive. This device gives you access to the Samsung Media Hub where you can purchase hit movies and TV shows.
In today’s world of dual processors, we were surprised to find that the Droid Charge runs on a single core 1 GHz Hummingbird application processor. Perhaps that is the reason that we found some performance gaps. There were lag times that were quite disconcerting. For instance, when going back to the dial pad during a phone call, there was a perceptible delay. This was also noticeable when performing other tasks. While we experienced no lag time for average games like Angry Birds, really fast-paced games produced noticeable pauses.
The Droid Charge can also be used as a mobile hot spot. A 4G connection can be shared with up to 10 devices, and a 3G connection can be used for up to five devices. Using this feature requires a mobile broadband plan from Verizon, which currently costs USD 20 per month for up to 2 GB of data. Using this feature will also deplete the batte
ry quite quickly.
While we found that we could perform simultaneous voice and data functions on the HTC Thunderbolt whether connected to the 3G or 4G network, this was not true on the Droid Charge. Performing simultaneous voice and data tasks was only possible when connected to the 4G LTE network.
While all smartphones seem to struggle with battery life issues, you would think that a phone with a name like “Charge” might be immune to this problem. This, however, is not so. Battery life was slightly less than the Thunderbolt, barely getting us through a single day of average use. The most noticeable problem seemed to be that when not in use, the Charge discharged more quickly than most devices of this type.
The charge has an expansion slot that increases the storage capacity to 32 GB and the device comes with a 32 GB card pre-installed. This is a useful feature for storing movies, songs, and data.
The Android operating system on the Droid Charge makes using email easy. You can quickly setup Gmail, exchange accounts, or other POP 3 and IMAP accounts.
One thing that you will notice is that because of the screen, the Droid Charge, like other OLED devices displays email and other text with white letters on a black background, as shown in Figure 8. Using a black background on an OLED display produces less battery drain. This type of display was fine for us, but if you have any vision issues, you may want to take a look at the white-on-black display before you buy.
Figure 8: The Droid Charge email text
