Motorola Droid Bionic: What's the big deal?
Verizon Wireless and Motorola Mobility on Wednesday announced the Droid Bionic will go on sale nationwide on September 8. It will be Verizon's thinnest LTE smartphone, and the second Motorola smartphone (after the Atrix 4G) to utilize a Lapdock and Firefox 4-based Webtop environment on top of Android.
Who could forget the Motorola Atrix 4G, right? That Android smartphone that could fit into a notebook dock or an HDMI dock and turn into either a netbook computer or a set-top box?
The Droid Bionic follows up on the ground broken by the Atrix 4G, and changes a few major things in the process.
How it's different from Atrix 4G
It's actually 4G - Droid Bionic is a "true" 4G device with an LTE radio. The Atrix 4G has an HSPA+ radio, which is 4G in name only.
It isn't built on Tegra 2- Motorola has gone with a dual-core 1GHz TI OMAP processor instead of the Nvidia Tegra 2 it used in the Atrix 4G.
It's incompatible with the Atrix docks- Even though the Atrix 4G and Droid Bionic both offer the same 11.6" laptop shell as a $299 accessory, the connector dock has been changed so an Atrix 4G cannot plug into a Droid Bionic dock and vice versa.
It's got a smaller battery- The Atrix 4G had a 1930 mAh battery, and the Droid Bionic has a 1735 mAh. This, in all likelihood was done to make the Bionic as thin as possible, even though it ended up being marginally thicker than the Atrix. This smaller battery capacity could prove troublesome for the device since LTE radios consume quite a bit of power. In fact, early reviewers said the Bionic got only 4 hours of battery life when connected to a 4G tower.
It's got a better camera- Droid Bionic has an 8 megapixel camera instead of 5, and it can capture 1080p HD video instead of 30fps 720p.
It's got a bigger screen- With a 4.3" qHD screen with Corning's Gorilla Glass, the Droid Bionic is larger and moderately heavier than the Atrix 4G.
The rest of the specs:
It runs Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread), has 1GB RAM and 16GB of onboard memory plus a 16GB microSD pre-installed, 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR, aGPS, sGPS, magnetometer, Adobe Flash 10, Motoprint Wi-fi print support, built-in Citrix Receiver and GoToMeeting support.
Droid Bionic will be available beginning September 8 for $299 plus a two-year service contract.
Since we're talking about Motorola, here's Tim Conneally's laundry list of disclosures