Motorola Droid Turbo Hidden features and Reviews

Before Galaxy, there was Droid—a brand so synonymous with Google's OS that few people knew or cared about the full Android namesake. But as the Samsung of the world gained ground, the killer robot brand languished, while Motorola itself turned its attention towards the fresher, cleaner Moto moniker. The new Droid Turbo ($199 with contract, 32GB ) is a course correct for the Verizon-Motorola partnership, from iterative to innovative. Brimming with the latest specs and features, the Droid Turbo is appreciably better than the new Moto X. The display is sharper, performance is better, and the battery is significantly larger. The killer-robot motif is dead, too, allowing this verifiably killer phone to speak for itself. The Droid Turbo earns our Editors' Choice award for Android phones on Verizon Wireless.

Motorola Droid Turbo Hidden features and Reviews

Design

The Droid Turbo definitely introduces a new material in the black model that we haven't seen before in a phone: a tightly woven cloth backing made of ballistic nylon. It's good to try new things, but this one could have been executed a little better.

To some it may feel tactile, but to us the material felt a little cheap, and instantly made us conscious of the state of grime on our fingers. How do you clean the black Turbo; will snack grease seep into the stitching? Meanwhile, the phone's rubberized sides add contrast, though we found the abrupt transition from textiles to soft-touch plastic a little jarring.

On the other hand, the cherry red Droid Turbo has a smooth, almost slippery Kevlar backing with a flashy holographic stitch pattern that echoes the black model. Its sides and the chin below the screen are the same plastic material.

Speaking of the chin, it forms a sharp peak beneath the screen, with just a small flattened area large enough for the Micro-USB charging port. This jutting ridge makes the grip uncomfortable for anyone who uses this area to hold the phone one-handed, as we do.

On the right spine, the power/lock and volume buttons are notched to give fingers extra purchase. A headset jack up top gives way to the rounded, non-removable backing. On both finishes, the 20.7-megapixel camera sits between two LED flashes and above the telltale Motorola insignia on the back. This time it's almost flush with the back plate, rather than indented as on other Moto models.

Display

You can’t see any of the pixels, it’s that detailed! To the surprise of many (and including us), the Motorola DROID Turbo is packing a 5.2-inch 1440 x 2560 QuadHD AMOLED display. Simply, it’s a marvel to behold because it’s one of the most pixel-dense screens on the market with its tally of 565 ppi. It’s so detailed that even when we look at it closely with our eye, it’s tough to decipher individual pixels.

Unfortunately, some of the display’s other characteristics aren’t as impressive. In particular, the screen achieves a maximum brightness output of 247 nits when measured displaying an all white image (that's the way we're measuring maximum brightness for all phones) – a pitiful mark we might add, one that’s near the bottom of our benchmark list and makes it hard to read outdoors in the sun. AMOLEDs are known for their lower brightness in such tests and they can actually have brighter output if the displayed image is not all white – e.g. if it is mostly a black screen with a few white areas, those areas may be significantly brighter than 247 nits. But still, this is a mediocre mark even in the land of AMOLED screens – to put it into perspective, we measured the Note 4's maximum brightness output at 468 nits.

Since this is stock Android we’re dealing with, the default keyboard is none other than the one provided by Google. It’s simple, logically arranged, and very responsive to make quick work out of sending short messages.

Messaging

Emails are handled by the stock Email app, but if you’re a Gmail user, there’s a dedicated app for that, of course. Interestingly, we can’t set up a Gmail account using the standard Email app because it directs us to use the Gmail app for that. Well, that’s not a deal breaker because the Gmail app is quite functional and delivers an experience similar to its desktop counterpart.

Memory and Processor

DROID Turbo is a beastly thing, especially that it’s powered by the formidable quad-core 2.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 SoCfeaturing the Adreno 420 GPU and coupled with 3GB of RAM. Without a doubt, the hardware it tow is enough to handle all operations we throw at it – including some intensive gaming titles. However, it’s part of the Motorola Mobile Computing System, one that also features a natural language processor and a contextual computing chip as well. At the end of the day, though, the DROID Turbo is just like what its name says – it’s turbo fast with its performance!

As much as we’d like to have a microSD card slot in this thing, we’re at least content with its 32GB of internal storage – albeit, there’s an option for a 64GB one too, which dons the ballistic nylon casing and an extra cost.

Camera

Sometimes more megapixels matter, like in the case of the Lumia 1020. Other times, they don't count for much, as is the case with the Droid Turbo's 21-megapixel camera. It's not bad by any stretch, but there's no real advantage over the Moto X's middling 13-megapixel camera. Shots look mostly good with sufficient light, but focus and exposure were inconsistent in my tests, rendering many shots unusably soft or washed out. When it nailed both, images looked nice, but still not quite as crisp or lifelike as the Note 4 or iPhone 6. The camera is quick to open and shoot, requiring less than a second to fire off shots; Motorola's wrist-twist gesture works reliably well for summoning the camera quickly. Indoors and under low light, image noise starts to obscure finer details, and long exposure times resulted in many blurry shots. There's no diffuser ring like with the Moto X, but I found the dual-LED flash on the Droid Turbo to be superior in side-by-side tests. Surprisingly, the Moto X's photos had more hotspots, where it overexposed part of each shot, and it wasn't much better than the Turbo at eliminating shadows to begin with.

Multimedia

Showing its ties to the Moto X once again, the gallery app is arranged and functions similarly to the one in the Moto X. A cool feature that some will appreciate is Highlight, which groups content according to date and automatically compiles a short “highlight reel” video for easy and quick sharing.

Sticking with the stock Android experience, the default music player comes from none other than the Google Play Music app – so we all know what it entails at this point. The latest update to the popular app brings some visual qualities that match the flavor with Android 5.0 Lollipop’s interface, but the core functionality remains unchanged.

Interestingly, the earpiece of the phone also doubles as its speaker, which produces an admirable 74.4 dB of audio power.

Good bad features of Motorola Droid Turbo

The Good Hands-free voice controls and epically long battery life supercharge the Motorola Droid Turbo. Its high screen resolution and crisp, nimble camera earn it bonus points.

The Bad A sharp bottom point makes the Droid Turbo uncomfortable to hold, and the black color's nylon backing feels cheap. The heavy phone also heats up fast.

The Bottom Line Even with its hefty design, the Motorola Droid Turbo's robust battery, powerful processor and vivid display put it on the short list for Verizon customers.