Motorola DROID Pro Review

Motorola DROID Pro. The name just sounds intimidating and serious. The iPhone captured the market by being fun and approachable, and Google took that a step further with Android by opening up the platform, making it customized and personal. But when you add “pro” to something you’re not messing around, and that’s exactly what Motorola is doing with their latest offering for Verizon Wireless. The Pro aims to take on the BlackBerry segment,

something Android has been garnering attention from anyway, but more specifically the BlackBerry power user, many of which have thus far resisted the lure of the little green robot. From the portrait QWERTY orientation to the lightning fast performance the Motorola DROID Pro is squarely aimed at the suits, but will it be enough to win over this fiercely loyal user base?

Included with the Motorola DROID Pro you will find:

Li-Ion battery
AC adapter with international adapters
USB cable
2GB microSD card
Design

The Motorola DROID Pro may share a form factor with BlackBerry, but it sure doesn’t feel like one. For starters it is narrow and tall, and the screen is very large. BlackBerry devices typically have displays of about 2.4 inches, orientated horizontally, but the DROID Pro features a 3.1” display in portrait orientation. This leaves less room for the keyboard in both dimensions, and as such the keyboard is much more cramped than you would find on a Curve or Bold. Motorola attempts to use the flared key design like we’ve seen with the Bold and Style, but the keys just don’t feel as natural on this device. Because the screen dominates the phone the bottom row of keys ends up at the very bottom of the phone, and this makes using it a bit awkward, similar to what we felt with the sides of the BlackBerry Style. A top-flight BlackBerry keyboard this is not, but that said it is still pretty good. Auto-correct generally fixed the mistakes we made, though in a typical few sentence email we would have to make one or two corrections ourselves, and as with any keyboard we got more used to it the more we used it.

The overall size of the Motorola DROID Pro is good. It has roughly the same footprint as the DROID 2, but is considerably lighter. This is because the device is mainly plastic. Motorola used high quality materials for the Pro, but we would have preferred a soft-touch back instead of the hard plastic they opted for. Nonetheless the DROID Pro feels quite solid in the hand and we don’t have any issues about its build quality.

The 3.1” display is good but not great. It has a resolution of 320x480 and is bright enough to be read in most lighting conditions comfortably. As you might expect it is a multi-touch capacitive touchscreen. It is plenty responsive and offers haptic feedback where appropriate. It surprised us that the screen was not rotating when we turned the phone, but it turns out the auto-rotate feature appears to be turned off by default on the DROID Pro, so a quick trip to the settings menu fixed that.

The Motorola DROID Pro has the standard four Android navigation keys below the screen. They are capacitive and integrated into the display, separate from the keyboard. On the left side are the volume rocker and microUSB charging port (which glows white while charging) and on the right is a programmable key much like BlackBerry convenience keys. The power button and 3.5mm headphone jack sit atop of the DROID Pro. The stylized back door houses the 5 megapixel camera with dual LED flash at the top left, and the DROID Pro’s single speaker centered near the bottom.

Overall the Motorola DROID Pro offers a good blend of size and functionality in this relatively new form factor for Android. The phone feels good in your hand, and when turned on its side the keypad doesn’t get in the way too much. While that keyboard isn’t as good as what you’d find on the BlackBerry Bold, it is still quite usable and will help the business crowd ease into the transition from their BlackBerry into the DROID Pro.

Source: Phonearena.com


















Motorola DROID Pro mobile