• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Droid 3 - First Impressions

So far the only thing I really don't like about this kick-ass phone is the display. It seems to have a slightly blue-ish, or not crisp white, about it. Other than that I love it.
I've not done a lot with it yet, mostly set it up, but dang...it's friggin' fast!
Music is OK out of the speaker w/PowerAmp, haven't tried headphones yet.
Videos are clear (YouTube, haven't taken any yet)
Pics are much better than my Droid 1.
I really like the KB, roomy and so much nicer than the D1's.
The volume keys, power button and slider are really tight...in a good way. I'm sure they will loosen in a bit.
I'll add more as I play more but I am not at all disappointed!!! Did I say it was fast?
 
After having used it for the evening, I definitely like this phone a lot. The keyboard is great. It is really fast.

However, I still am not sure what I think about the display. It almost seems like a rendering issue with text/ui graphics. Almost like the desktop is not running at a native resolution or something. Videos and good quality images seem to look good, to the point that I don't see the odd font issues (and even font ghosting while scrolling).

I do enjoy that there is more resolution to play with, but am really missing the crisp tiny font text that made me love the original Droid.
 
Clementine_3 said:
So far the only thing I really don't like about this kick-ass phone is the display. It seems to have a slightly blue-ish, or not crisp white, about it. Other than that I love it.
I've not done a lot with it yet, mostly set it up, but dang...it's friggin' fast!
Music is OK out of the speaker w/PowerAmp, haven't tried headphones yet.
Videos are clear (YouTube, haven't taken any yet)
Pics are much better than my Droid 1.
I really like the KB, roomy and so much nicer than the D1's.
The volume keys, power button and slider are really tight...in a good way. I'm sure they will loosen in a bit.
I'll add more as I play more but I am not at all disappointed!!! Did I say it was fast?
Click to expand...


The DX2 did not have this issue... Hope it is not common, or you had blue sunglasses on and forgot :)
 
So far so good. Resolution doesn't seem to be the greatest, but I haven't checked any high res pics yet. Everything else is great.
 
What you guys are seeing is indeed the pentile display. Do a google about the DX2 and pentile. It was a mess. If you think this display is "iffy", you would have *hated* the DX2's because being a bit larger, the pentile flaws were much, much more pronounced. Although I still see the problems, it's far less evident with the screen being a little smaller. The pixelation you're seeing is because the green channel is not rendering at full resolution, distorting some colors. That's why text that is either in color, or on a color background will appear jagged when the green subpixel is part of the color. The saturation on the D3 is a lot better than the DX2 and doesn't have the blue push, either. Side by side it's even more noticeable how much blue push the DX2 has.

Although not completely happy with the display, this is leaps and bounds better than the DX2.
 
I have mine also and played with it today.

Likes: keyboard is very nice, phone is fast and responsive, camera takes good pictures.

Dislikes: battery life doesn't seem that great (ordered the extended battery and door) I don't like the power button that much its too thin it seems to me. Tons of crap apps preloaded on the phone. Seems like they could have made the phone shorter if they didn't make the black border so large on the display or made the bottom section the same length as the top. It makes the screen seem smaller unlike the droid x where the border is much smaller.

As far as the screen unless I have the phone very close to my face, which I can't do with contacts in anyway I can't really see the pixelation.
 
Also netflix app isn't on the market downloaded the latest one and it installs and runs but the video is some green mess and no sound.
 
boatman said:
Call vzw, ask them for the unlock code, and you will be able to use your dutch sim card when in europe.
Click to expand...
Awesome. They just gave me the unlock code, how very awesome.



Another thing I noticed last night: when I am browsing the app market or another application, the "fancy" animation really bugs me. The screen turns black when switching screens and it really bothered my eyes. I turned off the animation.
 
aostang said:
What you guys are seeing is indeed the pentile display. Do a google about the DX2 and pentile. It was a mess. If you think this display is "iffy", you would have *hated* the DX2's because being a bit larger, the pentile flaws were much, much more pronounced. Although I still see the problems, it's far less evident with the screen being a little smaller. The pixelation you're seeing is because the green channel is not rendering at full resolution, distorting some colors. That's why text that is either in color, or on a color background will appear jagged when the green subpixel is part of the color. The saturation on the D3 is a lot better than the DX2 and doesn't have the blue push, either. Side by side it's even more noticeable how much blue push the DX2 has.

Although not completely happy with the display, this is leaps and bounds better than the DX2.
Click to expand...

Good summary of the tech and explains why black text looks sharp in web pages. I really liked the DX2 display, so if the D3 looks better due to smaller pixels, okay for me.
 
motarded1 said:
I have mine also and played with it today.

Likes: keyboard is very nice, phone is fast and responsive, camera takes good pictures.

Dislikes: battery life doesn't seem that great (ordered the extended battery and door) I don't like the power button that much its too thin it seems to me. Tons of crap apps preloaded on the phone. Seems like they could have made the phone shorter if they didn't make the black border so large on the display or made the bottom section the same length as the top. It makes the screen seem smaller unlike the droid x where the border is much smaller.

As far as the screen unless I have the phone very close to my face, which I can't do with contacts in anyway I can't really see the pixelation.
Click to expand...

The point about the big bezel is my main concern (besides the 512mb ram). Seems they could have put a 4.3"display with all that space.

If they made the device smaller to fit the display better, the keyboard would not be so roomy for typing. Seems the keyboard is a strong feature of the D3.
 
What about battery life: I had a good 8 hours sleep, which discharged the phone for 40% (no wifi, no gps on, constant email checking).

Anyone better experience?
 
Barbara said:
I'm guessing that it does since every other Droid has had gorilla glass. I just checked on their (Corning's) website and they don't list Droid 3 but they do all of the others.
Click to expand...


I believe VZW's site says that it has scratch-resistant glass.
 
Trillian said:
What about battery life: I had a good 8 hours sleep, which discharged the phone for 40% (no wifi, no gps on, constant email checking).

Anyone better experience?
Click to expand...

Worse.

With a fully charged battery less than 2 hours ago, I'm down to 70% without doing much of anything on the phone. 65% of the usage is cell standby. I tried updating the PRL but the number stayed the same so I'm not sure what to do next.
 
aostang said:
What you guys are seeing is indeed the pentile display. Do a google about the DX2 and pentile. It was a mess. If you think this display is "iffy", you would have *hated* the DX2's because being a bit larger, the pentile flaws were much, much more pronounced. Although I still see the problems, it's far less evident with the screen being a little smaller. The pixelation you're seeing is because the green channel is not rendering at full resolution, distorting some colors. That's why text that is either in color, or on a color background will appear jagged when the green subpixel is part of the color. The saturation on the D3 is a lot better than the DX2 and doesn't have the blue push, either. Side by side it's even more noticeable how much blue push the DX2 has.

Although not completely happy with the display, this is leaps and bounds better than the DX2.
Click to expand...

I can confirm this. This site and another site I use (d2jsp) are blue based sites, so the text looks pretty awful on them (though you can change the style on d2jsp, I may do that).

Black text on a white background looks better.. Slightly, but I still see the problem pretty pronounced with tiny fonts, or even white text on a black background (Connectbot) :(

Trillian said:
What about battery life: I had a good 8 hours sleep, which discharged the phone for 40% (no wifi, no gps on, constant email checking).

Anyone better experience?
Click to expand...

I put mine on the charger last night, but through nominal usage, it went from 100% to about 30% last night (about 5 hours worth of usage). I'll leave it off the charger tonight and see how it goes.

Barbara said:
Worse.

With a fully charged battery less than 2 hours ago, I'm down to 70% without doing much of anything on the phone. 65% of the usage is cell standby. I tried updating the PRL but the number stayed the same so I'm not sure what to do next.
Click to expand...

I noticed this last night too. The top end of the battery usage seems to go much faster than the bottom end through my experiences unplugged yesterday evening through usage.
 
With all of the playing I did yesterday I killed the battery before I went to bed and charged it overnight. So it is fresh today. I'll report back how it goes the rest of the day with normal usage.
 
Here is a side by side shot I took. This site resized the photo slightly, so you can't see the pixelation as much, but you can if you look closely. I can upload the original unresized photo to a file sharing site if anyone is interested. The first thing I notice out of the box is that the top bar is pixelated, the battery meter, and the small numbers next to the K9 icon. In the image, it looks a little sharp, but this is not the case in reality. On the original photo, I can tell that the D1 actually washes the colors out when zoomed way in, which makes it look much more "crisp". The D3 also has a distinctly more blue display.

nJFYq.jpg


This resized image doesn't really show the pixelation very well, so for many people, they probably won't even notice or care at all. I'm just hyper sensitive to such things I guess. :) Again, the original unresized photo does show the difference, it's just too large for most of these sites (6mb untouched).
 
Clementine_3 said:
My cell standby is also extremely high. I changed my mobile networks (in settings) to just use CDMA...that seems to be helping with the battery a bit anyway. No sense searching for GSM when it's not going to use it anyway.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip! Since I've never had a global phone, it didn't dawn on me that I needed to turn that off.
 
Clementine_3 said:
My cell standby is also extremely high. I changed my mobile networks (in settings) to just use CDMA...that seems to be helping with the battery a bit anyway. No sense searching for GSM when it's not going to use it anyway.
Click to expand...
My goodness, right now I am at 40 %. That's with five minutes of HD recording and then five minutes of transferring it through bluetooth. I just made the same change: from now on I will only use CDMA. There is indeed no use for GSM networks when they are not helping the signal strength anyway.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom