Motorola Droid 4 Review: A Solid Performer with a Trade-Off

The Motorola Droid 4, as seen in the review video, is a rival to the Motorola Droid Razr and Droid Razr Maxx in terms of performance. The device has similar specs to its predecessors, but it outperforms them thanks to its 1.2 GHz processor and double the RAM, which now stands at 1 GB. This makes a significant difference in terms of responsiveness and overall user experience.

In contrast to the Droid Razr, the Droid 4 feels too wide and thin. While it has a solid build quality, the keyboard is its main selling point. The reviewer highlights how well the slide-out QWERTY keyboard works, making it an impressive feature for those who value this type of input method. However, this comes at the cost of the screen size, which is reduced to 4 inches, and the display itself is not as attractive as some of its competitors.

One area where the Droid 4 shines is in performance. The reviewer notes that the device is a big improvement over the original Droid 3, particularly when it comes to tasks like setting multiple alarms at once. With more apps open on the device, there's little lag or slowdown, making it feel much faster and more responsive than its predecessor.

The price of $199, which is the same as the Droid Razr, makes the Droid 4 an attractive option for those who want a similar performance level without sacrificing features. However, potential buyers will need to weigh this against the trade-offs mentioned earlier, such as the smaller screen and lower-resolution display.

Overall, the Motorola Droid 4 is a solid performer that sets the benchmark for QWERTY keyboards in terms of performance and feel. While it may not be perfect, its pros make it an excellent choice for those who value this type of input method.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi this is Bryan for me a locker calm and we're here today with the motorola droid 4 to give you our full review now this is an evolutionary upgrade from the droid series we started with the droid the original droid back in late two thousand nine since then we've had the droid tomb which was very short-lived and quickly replaced with the droid 2 global which was essentially the same phone but offered a sim card slot for other sim cards so it could be a global roaming device then we had the droid 3 which also kept the global roaming capabilities and then now we have the droid 4 with the droid for the most noticeable changes are that it supports Verizon's 4G LTE network which is nice but then at least for right now we lose the global roaming capabilities and the reason I say right now is because there's a rumor that this phone somehow will be enabled for global roaming using a little bit different technology later on down the road but for right now that's hearsay and I can't substantiate that but this phone does offer some additional improvements in areas of design keyboard and which kind of goes into design but then you've got performance and the performance is going to be a big one for this device because this is a quite a step from the droid 3 and I'll explain why so you can see we've got the droid 4 here on the left and we've got the droid razr on the right you can see that we've got some of the same styling cues and motorola's doing this with all their new devices from the razor to the cyborg tablets to obviously the droid 4 we've got this tapered kind of bevel edge here which they're now kind of branding so all their devices kind of have the same look and feel which is definitely nice to see we do have a different screen size between these two you can see that the droid 4 has a 4.0 inch screen whereas the droid razr has a 4.3 inch screen and the droid razr is a traditional LCD panel so you can tell it looks a little bit more washed out everything kind of has a lowish tone to it and it looks if you if you compare it next to the droid razr it doesn't look very appealing but on its own merits if you're not staring at the the droid razr it actually looks pretty good its visible really well in sunlight have not had a problem with that whatsoever so the screen on the droid 4 is adequate it's not exceptional by any means but it's it's definitely if you compare it to other devices like the motorola droid razr the Samsung Galaxy Nexus the HTC Rezound you know even the the LG spectrum there are better screens out there and you're not going to be buying the droid 4 for the screen what you are probably going to be buying the droid 4 for is to have the the full five row cording keyboard hidden underneath the screen and it's an exceptional keyboard I've heard some people say that it's not quite as good as the droid 3 s keyboard I'm here to tell you that based on my experience it's exceptional and surpasses the droid 3 keyboard which outed as the best keyboard ever put on a mobile phone I now give that now to the droid for the only thing that we don't like is this caps lock key right here I really wish they would have left it as a shift and then a function key down here to choose your symbols some of the keys are just not placed where you really would think they should be and it's kind of difficult to get to get used to it at first but ultimately it's not that bad it's just a little bit of a learning curve it's a little bit different design but not all the changes are necessarily a good thing I just I don't think that people use caps enough to have it you know be its own dedicated button whereas you know pressing the shift key twice essentially gives you caps locks so that's really my only complaint about the about the keyboard itself with the backlit keys I'll go ahead and turn the lights down real quick so you can see the keys light up and if I can get it to turn on here here we go you can see the keys light up once we don't have a whole lot of light and it is quite a bright keyboard and I can tell you this looks absolutely phenomenal I don't know if the camera is doing it justice but it's a huge stretch from just having the individual letters and stuff lit up having the entire keyboard like this with the side let keys is absolutely tremendous the only downside to this is if you're using this in embedder you know somewhere dark that keyboard can that backlight cannot be adjusted and it is really bright so if you've got automatic brightness turned on you're going to notice that the actual keyboard can be brighter than the screen and it's not really a huge complaint just something to take note of all right carrying on with the design of this phone that nice tapered edge is seen on the on the front here and it kind of carries over into the back and is this nice curvature on the sides here which actually makes the phone really nice to hold in the hand it's a far cry from the other droid phones where it always kind of felt like a square brick in your hand this definitely feels much better it does have on the back a removable door however the battery is not removable in this model so keep that in mind the door does come out you insert a paper clip or a little tool that they give you here and the pot the back cover pops off and then you have access to your microSD card or I'm yeah I'm sorry your microSD card and your micro LTE sim and those go underneath the door but you do have protective covering over the battery saying not to remove it your warranty you gotta gotta gotta on the right side here we've got the volume rocker on the top we've got the power button and the headphone jack on the left side we've got the micro USB and micro HDMI ports and on the bottom we just got a microphone pick up you can see here the that motorola phones are so accustomed to having is gone in this model so overall on the design i really really like this design if you watch the motorola droid razr review i did it was very harsh and very critical of that design and the reason was the screen was 4.3 inches whereas you know this is four point oh so it's definitely a smaller screen here but there's there's a certain feel to it the droid razr feels too wide and honestly too thin whereas this device you know it's it's obviously a little bit thicker because it's got that keyboard but it has a really nice field has a really solid build quality to it and overall I'm extremely impressed with the stylings and the design of this phone alright so let's talk a little bit about performance to wrap this up the motorola droid 4 is a rival in terms of performance to the motorola droid razr and the droid razr maxx that is important to note because the droid 3 whereas it has similar specs you know the joy three had a 1.0 gigahertz processor and this has a 1.2 gigahertz processor not a huge change there but this has double the ram so we now have a device that's got a gig of ram versus 512 512 megabytes of ram so it's it's a big difference it's a big improvement and it really feels that way out of the box maybe you won't notice it as much but once you get some apps that are running in the background all of a sudden a simple tasks like going into your alarm clocks like this I've done this I can't tell you how many times with my with my droid 3 and it would just be very very laggy and you know you hit you know your alarm button and it takes five or 10 seconds for that to actually load and then you press on this and it might take 5-10 seconds for each alarm to be set to where you're not sure if you actually pressed it or not and it really was a problem across the board and if you had a lot of things running in the background the joy three was going to be very slow very laggy this is not the way that is whatsoever you can see I've got quite a few apps on here I mean page after page after page of applications oops and you can see that I've got you know quite a number of things loaded on this device and it still runs very quickly haven't had any real slow downs or lags to speak of so it's definitely been a solid performer it's 199 dollars which is the same price as the droid razr so you're not going to lose anything there in terms of performance you're either going to spend one hundred ninety nine dollars and get the droid for with the slide-out QWERTY keyboard which is you know absolutely impressive if you haven't actually tried this keyboard if a qwerty keyboard is that all important to you I definitely recommend that you go and you try this out it's hard to ignore how well this actually works and this really sets the benchmark for QWERTY sliders in terms of what the what the actual performance and what the feel of a quarry keyboard should be now you do lose some things you lose you know that screen this has a standard TFT with the pentile matrix arrangement and it's not really that attractive of a display but if that's something that's not hugely important to you then it's something that definitely can be overlooked it's not as beautiful as a lot of the other displays that are out there and really some of the displays are really just kind of I mean it's it's a big selling point for devices that have you know those HD displays or even the droid razr that's got that qhd display but it's got that Super AMOLED technology in it and it works really really well and it looks great this is a step down from that but you do get the keyboard but performance is going to be the same so it's a little bit of a trade-off obviously you've got a thinner device and a thicker device and that kind of stuff so you've got some decisions to make but at least you know that with this phone you're not getting some second-rate smartphone this is a you know top-tier top-shelf smartphone and it's its price pretty aggressively at one hundred ninety nine dollars and if you're a fan of the original droid line and you've kind of seen the progression maybe you had the original droid and then you saw the droid to droid 3 and you haven't been impressed at all this phone with the 4g LTE radio which is phenomenal radio gets much better reception than my galaxy nexus does it's definitely a solid performer I definitely recommend that you go check it out this is brian with the unlocker calm and we'll see you next time thanks a lothi this is Bryan for me a locker calm and we're here today with the motorola droid 4 to give you our full review now this is an evolutionary upgrade from the droid series we started with the droid the original droid back in late two thousand nine since then we've had the droid tomb which was very short-lived and quickly replaced with the droid 2 global which was essentially the same phone but offered a sim card slot for other sim cards so it could be a global roaming device then we had the droid 3 which also kept the global roaming capabilities and then now we have the droid 4 with the droid for the most noticeable changes are that it supports Verizon's 4G LTE network which is nice but then at least for right now we lose the global roaming capabilities and the reason I say right now is because there's a rumor that this phone somehow will be enabled for global roaming using a little bit different technology later on down the road but for right now that's hearsay and I can't substantiate that but this phone does offer some additional improvements in areas of design keyboard and which kind of goes into design but then you've got performance and the performance is going to be a big one for this device because this is a quite a step from the droid 3 and I'll explain why so you can see we've got the droid 4 here on the left and we've got the droid razr on the right you can see that we've got some of the same styling cues and motorola's doing this with all their new devices from the razor to the cyborg tablets to obviously the droid 4 we've got this tapered kind of bevel edge here which they're now kind of branding so all their devices kind of have the same look and feel which is definitely nice to see we do have a different screen size between these two you can see that the droid 4 has a 4.0 inch screen whereas the droid razr has a 4.3 inch screen and the droid razr is a traditional LCD panel so you can tell it looks a little bit more washed out everything kind of has a lowish tone to it and it looks if you if you compare it next to the droid razr it doesn't look very appealing but on its own merits if you're not staring at the the droid razr it actually looks pretty good its visible really well in sunlight have not had a problem with that whatsoever so the screen on the droid 4 is adequate it's not exceptional by any means but it's it's definitely if you compare it to other devices like the motorola droid razr the Samsung Galaxy Nexus the HTC Rezound you know even the the LG spectrum there are better screens out there and you're not going to be buying the droid 4 for the screen what you are probably going to be buying the droid 4 for is to have the the full five row cording keyboard hidden underneath the screen and it's an exceptional keyboard I've heard some people say that it's not quite as good as the droid 3 s keyboard I'm here to tell you that based on my experience it's exceptional and surpasses the droid 3 keyboard which outed as the best keyboard ever put on a mobile phone I now give that now to the droid for the only thing that we don't like is this caps lock key right here I really wish they would have left it as a shift and then a function key down here to choose your symbols some of the keys are just not placed where you really would think they should be and it's kind of difficult to get to get used to it at first but ultimately it's not that bad it's just a little bit of a learning curve it's a little bit different design but not all the changes are necessarily a good thing I just I don't think that people use caps enough to have it you know be its own dedicated button whereas you know pressing the shift key twice essentially gives you caps locks so that's really my only complaint about the about the keyboard itself with the backlit keys I'll go ahead and turn the lights down real quick so you can see the keys light up and if I can get it to turn on here here we go you can see the keys light up once we don't have a whole lot of light and it is quite a bright keyboard and I can tell you this looks absolutely phenomenal I don't know if the camera is doing it justice but it's a huge stretch from just having the individual letters and stuff lit up having the entire keyboard like this with the side let keys is absolutely tremendous the only downside to this is if you're using this in embedder you know somewhere dark that keyboard can that backlight cannot be adjusted and it is really bright so if you've got automatic brightness turned on you're going to notice that the actual keyboard can be brighter than the screen and it's not really a huge complaint just something to take note of all right carrying on with the design of this phone that nice tapered edge is seen on the on the front here and it kind of carries over into the back and is this nice curvature on the sides here which actually makes the phone really nice to hold in the hand it's a far cry from the other droid phones where it always kind of felt like a square brick in your hand this definitely feels much better it does have on the back a removable door however the battery is not removable in this model so keep that in mind the door does come out you insert a paper clip or a little tool that they give you here and the pot the back cover pops off and then you have access to your microSD card or I'm yeah I'm sorry your microSD card and your micro LTE sim and those go underneath the door but you do have protective covering over the battery saying not to remove it your warranty you gotta gotta gotta on the right side here we've got the volume rocker on the top we've got the power button and the headphone jack on the left side we've got the micro USB and micro HDMI ports and on the bottom we just got a microphone pick up you can see here the that motorola phones are so accustomed to having is gone in this model so overall on the design i really really like this design if you watch the motorola droid razr review i did it was very harsh and very critical of that design and the reason was the screen was 4.3 inches whereas you know this is four point oh so it's definitely a smaller screen here but there's there's a certain feel to it the droid razr feels too wide and honestly too thin whereas this device you know it's it's obviously a little bit thicker because it's got that keyboard but it has a really nice field has a really solid build quality to it and overall I'm extremely impressed with the stylings and the design of this phone alright so let's talk a little bit about performance to wrap this up the motorola droid 4 is a rival in terms of performance to the motorola droid razr and the droid razr maxx that is important to note because the droid 3 whereas it has similar specs you know the joy three had a 1.0 gigahertz processor and this has a 1.2 gigahertz processor not a huge change there but this has double the ram so we now have a device that's got a gig of ram versus 512 512 megabytes of ram so it's it's a big difference it's a big improvement and it really feels that way out of the box maybe you won't notice it as much but once you get some apps that are running in the background all of a sudden a simple tasks like going into your alarm clocks like this I've done this I can't tell you how many times with my with my droid 3 and it would just be very very laggy and you know you hit you know your alarm button and it takes five or 10 seconds for that to actually load and then you press on this and it might take 5-10 seconds for each alarm to be set to where you're not sure if you actually pressed it or not and it really was a problem across the board and if you had a lot of things running in the background the joy three was going to be very slow very laggy this is not the way that is whatsoever you can see I've got quite a few apps on here I mean page after page after page of applications oops and you can see that I've got you know quite a number of things loaded on this device and it still runs very quickly haven't had any real slow downs or lags to speak of so it's definitely been a solid performer it's 199 dollars which is the same price as the droid razr so you're not going to lose anything there in terms of performance you're either going to spend one hundred ninety nine dollars and get the droid for with the slide-out QWERTY keyboard which is you know absolutely impressive if you haven't actually tried this keyboard if a qwerty keyboard is that all important to you I definitely recommend that you go and you try this out it's hard to ignore how well this actually works and this really sets the benchmark for QWERTY sliders in terms of what the what the actual performance and what the feel of a quarry keyboard should be now you do lose some things you lose you know that screen this has a standard TFT with the pentile matrix arrangement and it's not really that attractive of a display but if that's something that's not hugely important to you then it's something that definitely can be overlooked it's not as beautiful as a lot of the other displays that are out there and really some of the displays are really just kind of I mean it's it's a big selling point for devices that have you know those HD displays or even the droid razr that's got that qhd display but it's got that Super AMOLED technology in it and it works really really well and it looks great this is a step down from that but you do get the keyboard but performance is going to be the same so it's a little bit of a trade-off obviously you've got a thinner device and a thicker device and that kind of stuff so you've got some decisions to make but at least you know that with this phone you're not getting some second-rate smartphone this is a you know top-tier top-shelf smartphone and it's its price pretty aggressively at one hundred ninety nine dollars and if you're a fan of the original droid line and you've kind of seen the progression maybe you had the original droid and then you saw the droid to droid 3 and you haven't been impressed at all this phone with the 4g LTE radio which is phenomenal radio gets much better reception than my galaxy nexus does it's definitely a solid performer I definitely recommend that you go check it out this is brian with the unlocker calm and we'll see you next time thanks a lot\n"