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Droid 3 - First Impressions

The multimedia dock is pretty nice improvement from before. You get two selections of productivity mode or sleep mode. I use productivity mode here at work, it's nice to see my calendar open to see appts. Nice...
 
After using this over the weekend, I really like this phone a lot. It's so consistently fast, and very responsive. I think this will only get better once we can root the phone and remove some of the preinstalled bloatware.

I tried the D1 again just for fun recently, and it really felt like a clunky old phone in comparison to the D3.

Definitely no buyers remorse here.
 
cozz said:
how are your guys' experience with call quality? I've had kind of a mixed bag so far with the dozen or so phone calls that i've had. for some of the calls i was thinking to myself the entire time how amazingly clear the phone sounded. for some of the calls it sounded so muffled and tinny that i had to ask the person on the other end to repeat what they were saying. and then i've had some calls in the middle where it was pretty good but not amazing. I haven't had enough calls yet to get any more info like signal strength or how frequent the bad calls happen, but I just thought I would ask to see what some of your thoughts are on call quality?
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Does anyone else have any comments on call quality? From what I have read the DX2 had excellent call quality, so I have not been too worried about it. Is it not the same for the Droid 3?
 
darrin2520 said:
Does anyone else have any comments on call quality? From what I have read the DX2 had excellent call quality, so I have not been too worried about it. Is it not the same for the Droid 3?
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Call quality seems good. It seems that the clarity is improved over the D1 at least, through the various calls I've done with it (and in various locations). Seems to work better in my house than the D1 did, and sounds better to boot.
 
Luigi Montanez said:
I posted a review:

DROID 3 Review | Luigi Montanez
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nice review. thank you. i have my og, and it is very laggy. one son got a d2g, not bad with extended battery. other son just gave up keyboard and went with charge. fantastic phone.

one thing i love with the og is that my battery life, with wifi and gps always on is just fantastic, even with old battery. i can go 24+hours, a few phone calls , lots of emails.

it seems that all new smart phones will need extended battery if you are a heavy user. got one for charge, got one for d2g, tbolt is useless without it as well. next gen of phones with chips made on new 32mm process might be better, but those phones are somewhere from 6-12 months away, so I have resigned myself that if you need a new phone in the near time frame, extended battery is required.

question that still has not be really answered is, how is call quality.

also , how is the wt of this phone in your pocket. trying to decide if i still need a slider if i go to a 4.3" phone. the slider adds wt, but on the og, i type like crap on the screen, even with swift beta. it's ok for reply to texts, but if i need to write a paragraph to a client, at least on og, i need a hard keyboard.
 
Call quality is great. I use speakerphone a lot and have yet to have a complaint, I tested it with another cell call and they could not tell when I was on speaker or not. Landline and cell calls sound good on my end and I sound good on their end.
 
xXIncognitoXx said:
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).
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Me thinks you people are being a little anal about the screen. I upgraded my droid to droid 3 and the droid 3 looks awesome. Anything that is NOT apple is great anyway.
 
mreine said:
Me thinks you people are being a little anal about the screen. I upgraded my droid to droid 3 and the droid 3 looks awesome. Anything that is NOT apple is great anyway.
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Screen quality is one thing that Apple does deserve credit for. The retina display is still the best mobile phone display on the market.
 
mreine said:
Me thinks you people are being a little anal about the screen. I upgraded my droid to droid 3 and the droid 3 looks awesome. Anything that is NOT apple is great anyway.
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No, green text on blue is awful. It's not being anal, small fonts look like crud on this screen. Especially greens.

And I take back my joy over this device. Today it has been off the charger for 6 hours, and the battery is at 10%! W T F! I am very unhappy with this, to say the least. Here are my usage stats:

6h 7m 42s on battery (10% remaining)
Cell standby 40% (0% time without a signal, been in an area with 4 bars almost all day)
Phone idle 31%
Display 13% (Time on 1h 25m 12s)
Android OS 9%
Android System 5%
Browser 3%

I contacted a friend of mine, and he said I should just replace the battery, mine might be defective. I sure hope that is the case, because this is really awful. I have also noticed that it's running warmer periodically, like others have reported.

GPS, Sync, Wifi, Bluetooth all off, set to CDMA mode. (Has been for days now).

Bleh!! :(

Going to let it completely run the battery down and then do a full recharge. Will have similar usage patterns tomorrow, so if it repeats itself again tomorrow, I'll definitely have to get another battery at a minimum (replacement or otherwise).
 
aostang said:
Screen quality is one thing that Apple does deserve credit for. The retina display is still the best mobile phone display on the market.
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"Retina" display is probably one of the more silly names created by a marketing team. Typical Apple snooty ways.
 
xXIncognitoXx said:
No, green text on blue is awful. It's not being anal, small fonts look like crud on this screen. Especially greens.

And I take back my joy over this device. Today it has been off the charger for 6 hours, and the battery is at 10%! W T F! I am very unhappy with this, to say the least. Here are my usage stats:

6h 7m 42s on battery (10% remaining)
Cell standby 40% (0% time without a signal, been in an area with 4 bars almost all day)
Phone idle 31%
Display 13% (Time on 1h 25m 12s)
Android OS 9%
Android System 5%
Browser 3%

I contacted a friend of mine, and he said I should just replace the battery, mine might be defective. I sure hope that is the case, because this is really awful. I have also noticed that it's running warmer periodically, like others have reported.

GPS, Sync, Wifi, Bluetooth all off, set to CDMA mode. (Has been for days now).

Bleh!! :(

Going to let it completely run the battery down and then do a full recharge. Will have similar usage patterns tomorrow, so if it repeats itself again tomorrow, I'll definitely have to get another battery at a minimum (replacement or otherwise).
Click to expand...

Given the fact that nothing seems 100% compatible with this phone, or gingerbread, I think certain apps may not be running right. It very well could be a defective battery too though...Just go into a store Thursday and exchange for new phone.
 
xXIncognitoXx said:
No, green text on blue is awful. It's not being anal, small fonts look like crud on this screen. Especially greens.

And I take back my joy over this device. Today it has been off the charger for 6 hours, and the battery is at 10%! W T F! I am very unhappy with this, to say the least. Here are my usage stats:

6h 7m 42s on battery (10% remaining)
Cell standby 40% (0% time without a signal, been in an area with 4 bars almost all day)
Phone idle 31%
Display 13% (Time on 1h 25m 12s)
Android OS 9%
Android System 5%
Browser 3%

I contacted a friend of mine, and he said I should just replace the battery, mine might be defective. I sure hope that is the case, because this is really awful. I have also noticed that it's running warmer periodically, like others have reported.

GPS, Sync, Wifi, Bluetooth all off, set to CDMA mode. (Has been for days now).

Bleh!! :(

Going to let it completely run the battery down and then do a full recharge. Will have similar usage patterns tomorrow, so if it repeats itself again tomorrow, I'll definitely have to get another battery at a minimum (replacement or otherwise).
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Small green fonts do look rough, but they have to be pretty tiny to be that way and not many sites or content in green fonts. For me, positives of the display offset this. Now, if black was funky- different story.

I prefer the sharpness and color, compared to the Charge (Charge looks cartoon level with reds & greens).
 
mikepinto65 said:
Given the fact that nothing seems 100% compatible with this phone, or gingerbread, I think certain apps may not be running right. It very well could be a defective battery too though...Just go into a store Thursday and exchange for new phone.
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Only running Trillian and K9, I am killing off all other apps that I can, besides those that instantly restart (no point). I am not repeatedly killing them off, just every once in a while (only once or twice since I took the phone off the charger).

If it's a software issue, the battery page is NOT reporting the software sucking down cpu/battery. I suspect it's not software related, but a problem with the baseband, or possibly yes, the battery is defective in some way.

Still, not fun, and not something one should have to be worrying about with a new phone. It's hardly isolated, there are many reports of battery problems from people on this site and others, which is why I suspect it's something not related directly to the battery itself.

Edit: Phone just died with less than 7 hours time off the charger. Wow, what a joke.
 
ekyle said:
That's a Gingerbread restriction. Google didn't like the way FB locks down it's contacts.
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No, it's not. I use CM 7.1 on the D1, CM 7.1 is Gingerbread 2.3.4 and behaves exactly like every previous build of Android letting me only sync existing contacts, it is a Motorola decision.
 
xXIncognitoXx said:
After using this over the weekend, I really like this phone a lot. It's so consistently fast, and very responsive. I think this will only get better once we can root the phone and remove some of the preinstalled bloatware.

I tried the D1 again just for fun recently, and it really felt like a clunky old phone in comparison to the D3.

Definitely no buyers remorse here.
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What's the status of your D1? Was it rooted? ROMed (which one)? Overclocked (how fast)?
 
xXIncognitoXx said:
Only running Trillian and K9, I am killing off all other apps that I can, besides those that instantly restart (no point). I am not repeatedly killing them off, just every once in a while (only once or twice since I took the phone off the charger).

If it's a software issue, the battery page is NOT reporting the software sucking down cpu/battery. I suspect it's not software related, but a problem with the baseband, or possibly yes, the battery is defective in some way.

Still, not fun, and not something one should have to be worrying about with a new phone. It's hardly isolated, there are many reports of battery problems from people on this site and others, which is why I suspect it's something not related directly to the battery itself.

Edit: Phone just died with less than 7 hours time off the charger. Wow, what a joke.
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Have you already completed a full re-charge prior to now? Most batteries need a couple full recharges to begin holding their power more efficiently.
 
xXIncognitoXx said:
Still, not fun, and not something one should have to be worrying about with a new phone. It's hardly isolated, there are many reports of battery problems from people on this site and others, which is why I suspect it's something not related directly to the battery itself.

Edit: Phone just died with less than 7 hours time off the charger. Wow, what a joke.
Click to expand...

Have you tried Juice Defender? It's a pretty good app that extends battery life by controlling data usage, only letting apps refresh data at a certain interval. There's a free version that is good, and one for a few bucks that has tons of customization options. On my d2 I used this for a while and it extended the battery life almost double.

I agree that we shouldn't have to deal with this on a new phone, but this could be something that helps. It also could help you give some idea where all this batter consumption is coming from if it makes a big difference.

So far today my phone has been unplugged for 7hrs 50min with light usage (been at work) and the phone is at 70%. (not using juice defender)

Cell Standby 51%
Phone Idle 39%
Display 5%
Andoid OS 3%
Android system 2%
Browser 2%

Just wondering, is your phone synced up with facebook? I know that was a HUGE battery killer on d2 early on
 
Already mentioned in previous replies, but background info is:

D1 was rooted, no custom rom, was not overclocked, using the same software, only trillian and k9 was running at any given time.

As far as the D3, it is set up with GPS, Sync, Wifi, Bluetooth all disabled, CDMA instead of global mode, and only trillian and k9 running. I do not use any other apps or widgets, nothing else should be polling, and none of it auto starts. I do see that vz navigator and maps keeps auto starting, but again, that should be of no consequence with gps disabled. Additionally, the battery meter does not indicate any software is sucking down juice, so I don't think that's what it is.

I did let it fully die this time, only a wopping 7 hours, 16 seconds uptime (ridiculous). 2 hours later, and it's fully charged. Will leave it on the charger for the rest of the day, and take it off again tomorrow morning and see how it goes. I should have basically the same usage patterns tomorrow as I did today. If it happens again, I'm not going to be very happy to say the least.

One thing that occurred to me after the fact was that my uptime was a little over a day, and yesterday afternoon I was messing with trying to root it and playing around on it using adb, and I think the last time I had used it, I may not have rebooted, so it may have still be running as a debug background service. It's possible that that is what may be the culprit, but again, will know for sure tomorrow (as I have rebooted it, and don't plan on messing with that again this evening.)

Crossing my fingers that maybe that was it, but seems unlikely to be honest.
 
I am on day 4 with mine. Battery seems good now, used it all day and its still at 70%. Running it with ADW.launcher which seems to work great. Tried LauncherPro but for some reason my Droid 3 hated it. Was making my phone run really hot and eating my battery for breakfast.

Also, pro tip for camera use. Slide open the keyboard and press the ok button to take pictures if you don't like the touch screen.
 
rushmore said:
"Retina" display is probably one of the more silly names created by a marketing team. Typical Apple snooty ways.
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Lol, I actually like that name for the display. It seemed cool. It's better than the "cataract" display on my old touch pro. :p

I checked out the display on the DX2, D3 and Atrix...and the DX2 and D3 are pretty much the same which isn't a bad thing. I have one more week and I'm getting this phone. Yay!
 
This is my photo comparison between a Droid 1 and Droid 3. This was a picture taken 5 days ago with Droid 1:

7611182grams.jpg


This is a similar picture taken today with the Droid 3:

36days4.jpg
 
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