Motorola Droid 3 Review - Third Time's a Charm

Concluding Thoughts

So here we are, one year after the Droid 2, and now we have the Droid 3. Dual core smartphones are now pretty much the norm, and overall smartphone adoption shows little to no signs of slowing down anytime soon. On its own, the Droid 3 is a considerable upgrade over the Droid 2. You get a vastly better keyboard, higher resolution display, better cameras, higher resolution and better quality video recording, much better CPU and GPU performance, a better baseband with GSM/WCDMA compatibility out of the box, and Android 2.3.4. One short year later, the same price buys you a considerably better device in almost every possible category. 

The problem is that there’s no LTE onboard, which seems in retrospect like a major tactical error on Motorola’s part until you consider that adding that in would likely dramatically change the Droid 3’s size and battery life. Like it or not, we’re still in the first generation of LTE modems, all of which are 45nm at present. Qualcomm’s LTE MDM9600 baseband, which is at the core of an overwhelming majority of current Verizon Wireless LTE devices, is a 45nm part and not directly voice enabled. Around mid 2012, MDM9615 will begin shipping, bringing 28nm LTE/EVDO/DC-HSPA+ connectivity in a slightly smaller, less power-hungry package, and also bringing onboard voice to bear. Only at that point (or with MSM8960 potentially sooner) and with similar parts does LTE connectivity on the device become something you can include without a complicated dual-baseband solution.

It’s roundabout, but basically what looks at first like a tactical error on Motorola’s part really isn’t - they made a design tradeoff and instead the Droid 3 is one of the thinnest (if not the thinnest) devices with a slide-out keyboard. Instead, if you want LTE and a physical keyboard, you’re going to have to wait a while until Samsung or another partner brings it to bear. That said, Motorola does have some LTE-enabled devices headed to Verizon, which we’ll look at in due time, but they likely won’t include keyboards. 

If you’re in a market that Verizon hasn’t included in its official list for deployment by the end of 2011, there’s really no point to owning a first generation LTE smartphone. At that point, current devices like the Droid X2 or Droid 3 make sense, or waiting for devices based on some less power-hungry second generation basebands that will no doubt be the rage around the same time next year. 

I like the Droid 3 a lot more than I thought I would going into it, just because of how much importance I personally put on having the fastest cellular connectivity. It’s sort of a running joke among friends and people that know me that I spend far too much time running speed tests, and so I went into this review ready to be underwhelmed by more EVDO slowness. I was definitely wrong about how great this device really turned out to be. Keyboard, display, OMAP4, and overall size culminate to a device that feels like way more than just an updated Droid 2. 

The device has had another unintended side-effect as well. The Droid 3’s awesome keyboard has made me wish more of the Android flagship, triple-A devices had physical keyboards. Capacitive multitouch keyboards are great, but something is always going to get lost in the process of making a keyboard virtual. It’s also clear to me that developer focus has shifted away from landscape view, with so many Android applications forcing you into portrait-only mode because there’s so much more attention on portrait than landscape devices with keyboards. Maybe it’s time for a Nexus device with a keyboard to remind developers that landscape still exists.