Review of Motorola Droid 4

The Motorola Droid 4 is a smartphone produced by Motorola Mobility. It runs Android 2.3 and can upgrade to Android 4.0 in the future. It was released on Verizon Wireless's network on February 10, 2012. It is the successor to Motorola's Droid 3. The processing power on the Droid 4 is par for the course. Unlike its predecessor, Motorola has upped the RAM from 512MB to 1GB. The processor has also switched from a 1GHz dual-core NVidia Tegra 2 to a 1.2GHz dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP 4430. Internal storage still sits at 16GB, but there is a micro SD slot, something the iPhone 4S and Galaxy Nexus do not have. It also has all of the standard smartphone perks like an accelerometer, GPS, digital compass, barometer, and Bluetooth. Motorola has tried to cover up the screen’s problems with its Ninja Blur user interface, which re-colors Android 2.3 with a gray-and-dark-blue color scheme (these are two colors that actually tend to show up correctly). Apps like Amazon Kindle and BlockBuster are back, as are GoToMeeting, Let's Golf 2, Madden NFL 12, MOG Music, Netflix, NFL Mobile, Quick office, Slacker and Sling box. And, of course, there's Motorola's suite of apps like MOTOACTV and MOTOPRINT, plus Verizon's VCAST apps. Motorola's also included its excellent Smart Actions app, which lets you tweak and set all sort of conditional settings. So the Droid 4 has a couple of cameras. There's a 1.3-megapixels shooter out front, and an 8MP shooter in the rear. Motorola's software remains excellent, with a slew of settings and scenes and other features, including multishot and panorama. Motorola Droid 4 is a capable Android smartphone, and it's easily the finest in the Droid line. It's a worthy cousin of the Droid RAZR MAXX, with probably the finest keyboard we've used. But the keyboard doesn't make up for the underwhelming display. It's time for some 720p resolution, and time to get rid of the PenTile matrix. Motorola’s cleaned up the overall look of the Droid 4 keyboard by getting rid of the secondary characters on all of the letter keys. To make up for it, the number row at the top of the keyboard now houses most of the basic symbols. Punctuation like the comma, period, slash, apostrophe and hyphen are still top-level characters. The software on the Droid 4 is nearly identical to that of the Droid RAZR MAXX. There's also a nice toggle for sound on/off.