Motorola DROID Turbo Review

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: endoes it seem like every phone manufacturer has a wicked case of electronic anorexia we get these hyper-thin phones that seem content to spend all day measuring themselves on a scale and admiring themselves in the mirror and maybe some people find that sexy but you know what i see insecurity weakness and a lack of stamina none of which makes for a good night in the sorry what were we talking about uh right back on track part two of our triple curved monitor surround is coming soon so make sure you're subscribed to catch that curvy is beautiful and on that note the droid turbo can turbo my droid all night long if you know what i mean i mean it's thicker than most flagship mobile devices because it's got you know a big internal battery so at night time the phone is still running that's what i meant by the all night long i mean what did you think the cooler master neptune 240m features an exclusive pump design and their new celencio fans to provide impressive near silent performance click now to learn more so we'll kick things off with specs picture in your mind's eye what the baldness smartphone specs might be for a moment basically that a top-of-the-line snapdragon 805 adreno 420 gpu three gigs of ram a 5.2 inch amoled quad hd display covered in gorilla glass 3 32 or 64 gigs of internal storage wireless charging ac wireless internal and exterior nano coating for splash resistance and a 3 900 milliamp hour battery i'm sorry linus what did you just say this thing has just about enough battery capacity to power itself and act as a battery bank for my buddy's iphone yeah yeah i did but calm yourself down i'll talk more about it later let's do the quick physical overview first at the back we find the 21 megapixel still camera that also records ultra hd at 24 fps with its super bright dual flashes a motorola logo and one of the most satisfying material choices that i've ever encountered on a phone i mean gorilla glass aluminum unibody blah blah blah blah blah the droid turbo's ballistic nylon doesn't do as much as i expected to improve grippiness but it's something different it looks and feels amazing in the hand and i was even able to clean the pasta sauce that my two-year-old spilled on it without too much effort seriously i could have killed him though anyway on the left we got nothing on the bottom micro usb and on the right the well positioned but slightly mushy lock button and volume rocker that doubles as a nano sim tray and then finally on the top of three and a half millimeter jack i actually prefer this position makes it a little easier to sort of pull the phone out of your pocket and look at something without getting it caught on stuff which leads us around to the front the mono speaker does face forward and it's loud enough but sound quality is very unexceptional fortunately the screen is a different story now i criticized lg's choice of a quad hd display in the g3 because i don't think the minuscule improvement in display sharpness was worth the lackluster contrast in that case and i still don't think a 2560x1440 display is necessary on a smartphone but the amoled display that motorola opted for enables that cool notification system where only the necessary pixels are illuminated for previews and gives the droid turbo's display rocking contrast that makes it look great even outside it's not perfect i wish that minimum brightness was actually lower for nighttime viewing there's more motion blur than i'd like when scrolling and there's a noticeably cool color shift when you look at it off axis but after the first couple of days i pretty much stopped noticing most of those things something i didn't stop noticing was the fact that this is the first android phone that i've used in over a year with dedicated capacitive buttons i don't generally have a preference either way but i did find that with this phone holding it in landscape mode was a little tricky without mashing those buttons so just watch out for that if you're picking one up so let's get into actually using it first the big question isn't it heavy linus with that massive battery in it and the answer is no the curvature of the back feels very natural in my hand and the weight gives it a satisfying premium feel without making it feel brick like okay then line a second question do you actually get 48 hours out of it like motorola claims because that'd be sick dog and the answer here is also no and i'll throw in a don't be ridiculous for good measure i usually end it up with 35 to 40 left at the end of the day and power users will still be able to drain their battery in a single day by doing things like playing games or navigating with gps i'm even sitting here writing this at the end of a work day i'll be at a fairly long work day with a mere 25 left which is obviously not enough to make it through another day tomorrow but while two day battery was a silly claim for motorola to make the extra capacity of the droid turbo has changed the way that i use my phone for a single day and switching back to something with a more normal battery size will be extremely difficult i did alter the default two minute backlight timeout to one minute that was just showing off but i was able to keep all my features on crank that brightness browse whenever i was bored and i didn't even bother carrying a battery bank while i was using it between the qi wireless dock in my car and motorola's included 12 volt fast charger that can restore this much battery in this much time here's a graph i didn't add it to my script in a pinch even though i'm still plugging into a one amp charger every night to preserve the lifetime of my battery i felt liberated somehow because i'm not thinking about my battery all the time onto software there's not much to say it's motorola's skin so you get pretty much bone stock android apparently there's a lollipop upgrade coming very soon which is good because art runtime is bugged on kitkat on this phone and then it's got a couple of moto tweaks including their wave to preview your notifications they're slide to unlock they're somewhat useless voice control that i found routed voice commands through google now more often than not which is fine i guess and there you go it's moto skin one thing i noticed although it's not directly related to software was that whichever keyboard i was using stock android or swiftkey i am bloody accurate on the droid turbo the bottom is a little pointy resting on my pinkies but the chin bar size is pretty much perfect to me and i can fly on this thing which leads us to the most negative part of this review the camera is wicked fast to open with one of the most reliable gesture launch mechanisms i have ever seen and it takes fantastic 20 plus megapixel stills like this one of my cat rumble with gorgeous shallow depth of field but the problem is in the word stills moving subjects whether you're trying to capture a photo with the extremely slow shutter leg or a video with the non-optical stabilized jittery feeling motion that doesn't seem to be avoidable just don't work that well for this phone i tried a couple alternate camera apps and neither of them helped so all i can do at this point is hope that motorola fixes this with the lollipop update or shortly thereafter because otherwise it's going to be a serious mark against this phone for a lot of people which leads us to the conclusion for this video it amazes me that i even have to applaud the technological innovation of put a bigger freaking battery in it but that's what i'm gonna do i don't want a lighter phone my fingers aren't made of you know limp spaghetti i want one that works better and for longer and that's what the droid turbo does and is why in spite of its camera it's earned its place as my new daily driver until further notice this is a great phone and my only other big complaint is availability it's verizon exclusive in the us right now and while the verizon apps and occasional hey your sim isn't verizon message are easy to ignore you just plain can't buy one in the us without a verizon contract right now which is going to hurt third third-party modder support if you're into routing your phones and installing custom roms and whatnot although this may be less of an issue outside of the us where there's a max skew that you know may be possible to purchase depending on the region so i think that's pretty much it guys thank you for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if your feelings are more complicated than this and as always check out the support us link if you like our videos you can give us a monthly contribution buy a cool t-shirt like this one or change your amazon bookmarked one with our affiliate code so that whenever you buy phone stands or whatever it's the only thing left on this table so i'm holding it up whoops it fell uh whenever you buy phone stands we get a small kickback that kind of thing helps us out a lot thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribedoes it seem like every phone manufacturer has a wicked case of electronic anorexia we get these hyper-thin phones that seem content to spend all day measuring themselves on a scale and admiring themselves in the mirror and maybe some people find that sexy but you know what i see insecurity weakness and a lack of stamina none of which makes for a good night in the sorry what were we talking about uh right back on track part two of our triple curved monitor surround is coming soon so make sure you're subscribed to catch that curvy is beautiful and on that note the droid turbo can turbo my droid all night long if you know what i mean i mean it's thicker than most flagship mobile devices because it's got you know a big internal battery so at night time the phone is still running that's what i meant by the all night long i mean what did you think the cooler master neptune 240m features an exclusive pump design and their new celencio fans to provide impressive near silent performance click now to learn more so we'll kick things off with specs picture in your mind's eye what the baldness smartphone specs might be for a moment basically that a top-of-the-line snapdragon 805 adreno 420 gpu three gigs of ram a 5.2 inch amoled quad hd display covered in gorilla glass 3 32 or 64 gigs of internal storage wireless charging ac wireless internal and exterior nano coating for splash resistance and a 3 900 milliamp hour battery i'm sorry linus what did you just say this thing has just about enough battery capacity to power itself and act as a battery bank for my buddy's iphone yeah yeah i did but calm yourself down i'll talk more about it later let's do the quick physical overview first at the back we find the 21 megapixel still camera that also records ultra hd at 24 fps with its super bright dual flashes a motorola logo and one of the most satisfying material choices that i've ever encountered on a phone i mean gorilla glass aluminum unibody blah blah blah blah blah the droid turbo's ballistic nylon doesn't do as much as i expected to improve grippiness but it's something different it looks and feels amazing in the hand and i was even able to clean the pasta sauce that my two-year-old spilled on it without too much effort seriously i could have killed him though anyway on the left we got nothing on the bottom micro usb and on the right the well positioned but slightly mushy lock button and volume rocker that doubles as a nano sim tray and then finally on the top of three and a half millimeter jack i actually prefer this position makes it a little easier to sort of pull the phone out of your pocket and look at something without getting it caught on stuff which leads us around to the front the mono speaker does face forward and it's loud enough but sound quality is very unexceptional fortunately the screen is a different story now i criticized lg's choice of a quad hd display in the g3 because i don't think the minuscule improvement in display sharpness was worth the lackluster contrast in that case and i still don't think a 2560x1440 display is necessary on a smartphone but the amoled display that motorola opted for enables that cool notification system where only the necessary pixels are illuminated for previews and gives the droid turbo's display rocking contrast that makes it look great even outside it's not perfect i wish that minimum brightness was actually lower for nighttime viewing there's more motion blur than i'd like when scrolling and there's a noticeably cool color shift when you look at it off axis but after the first couple of days i pretty much stopped noticing most of those things something i didn't stop noticing was the fact that this is the first android phone that i've used in over a year with dedicated capacitive buttons i don't generally have a preference either way but i did find that with this phone holding it in landscape mode was a little tricky without mashing those buttons so just watch out for that if you're picking one up so let's get into actually using it first the big question isn't it heavy linus with that massive battery in it and the answer is no the curvature of the back feels very natural in my hand and the weight gives it a satisfying premium feel without making it feel brick like okay then line a second question do you actually get 48 hours out of it like motorola claims because that'd be sick dog and the answer here is also no and i'll throw in a don't be ridiculous for good measure i usually end it up with 35 to 40 left at the end of the day and power users will still be able to drain their battery in a single day by doing things like playing games or navigating with gps i'm even sitting here writing this at the end of a work day i'll be at a fairly long work day with a mere 25 left which is obviously not enough to make it through another day tomorrow but while two day battery was a silly claim for motorola to make the extra capacity of the droid turbo has changed the way that i use my phone for a single day and switching back to something with a more normal battery size will be extremely difficult i did alter the default two minute backlight timeout to one minute that was just showing off but i was able to keep all my features on crank that brightness browse whenever i was bored and i didn't even bother carrying a battery bank while i was using it between the qi wireless dock in my car and motorola's included 12 volt fast charger that can restore this much battery in this much time here's a graph i didn't add it to my script in a pinch even though i'm still plugging into a one amp charger every night to preserve the lifetime of my battery i felt liberated somehow because i'm not thinking about my battery all the time onto software there's not much to say it's motorola's skin so you get pretty much bone stock android apparently there's a lollipop upgrade coming very soon which is good because art runtime is bugged on kitkat on this phone and then it's got a couple of moto tweaks including their wave to preview your notifications they're slide to unlock they're somewhat useless voice control that i found routed voice commands through google now more often than not which is fine i guess and there you go it's moto skin one thing i noticed although it's not directly related to software was that whichever keyboard i was using stock android or swiftkey i am bloody accurate on the droid turbo the bottom is a little pointy resting on my pinkies but the chin bar size is pretty much perfect to me and i can fly on this thing which leads us to the most negative part of this review the camera is wicked fast to open with one of the most reliable gesture launch mechanisms i have ever seen and it takes fantastic 20 plus megapixel stills like this one of my cat rumble with gorgeous shallow depth of field but the problem is in the word stills moving subjects whether you're trying to capture a photo with the extremely slow shutter leg or a video with the non-optical stabilized jittery feeling motion that doesn't seem to be avoidable just don't work that well for this phone i tried a couple alternate camera apps and neither of them helped so all i can do at this point is hope that motorola fixes this with the lollipop update or shortly thereafter because otherwise it's going to be a serious mark against this phone for a lot of people which leads us to the conclusion for this video it amazes me that i even have to applaud the technological innovation of put a bigger freaking battery in it but that's what i'm gonna do i don't want a lighter phone my fingers aren't made of you know limp spaghetti i want one that works better and for longer and that's what the droid turbo does and is why in spite of its camera it's earned its place as my new daily driver until further notice this is a great phone and my only other big complaint is availability it's verizon exclusive in the us right now and while the verizon apps and occasional hey your sim isn't verizon message are easy to ignore you just plain can't buy one in the us without a verizon contract right now which is going to hurt third third-party modder support if you're into routing your phones and installing custom roms and whatnot although this may be less of an issue outside of the us where there's a max skew that you know may be possible to purchase depending on the region so i think that's pretty much it guys thank you for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if your feelings are more complicated than this and as always check out the support us link if you like our videos you can give us a monthly contribution buy a cool t-shirt like this one or change your amazon bookmarked one with our affiliate code so that whenever you buy phone stands or whatever it's the only thing left on this table so i'm holding it up whoops it fell uh whenever you buy phone stands we get a small kickback that kind of thing helps us out a lot thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe\n"