I decided to write up a post for new users to the Bionic or thinking of switching to the Bionic.
I purchased my Bionic 24 hours before I heard about the Razr being announced. After a little fuming at the cliche of a 24 hour scoop like that I settled in to the device and decided against returning it.
I came to the Bionic from the OG (Moto Droid 1). I had been installing ROMs issued by Peter Alfonso. I am a self employed professional user and mainly used the root access for free tethering to my work computer while on the road. I appreciated being able to run the latest/greatest software after Motorola had long stopped tending to the OG and this is why I skipped from G1 to G3/4 (whoever is in charge of the generation numbering can correct me later).
I immediately found a one-click root method for the Bionic and rooted it... tried to tether and FAIL. I saw the discussions about the SQLite hack and considered it but then decided to just unroot and wait for more news.
The more news seemed to be that the OTA was going to permanently disable root access while also bringing a radio 4g/3g switch fix, among other things. I later read that a leaked copy of the OTA was out and saw that there was some favorable feedback about the radio quality.
I decided to go all in... I reverted to stock (there is a one-click app out there that will unbrick and return to stock on the Bionic... this is great... no fear!) and then rooted. I then applied a suggested method to achieve permanent root... which at least worked well enough to apply the leaked update and maintain root. The radio fix seems to be high quality as I stream netflix movies for my kids in the car and it improved the occasional loss of signal/restarts, etc.
I then made the tether work via the SQ hack. So I am now running the latest Bionic software via the leak, with root, and with free tethering. I also have a bootloader that allows for custom roms, etc. but have not installed a custom rom. I am using the extended battery.
With that background... my review:
This is a great damn product. It is very fast and responsive. I like the screen and don't mind the complaints referenced by others on here. It sort of gives everything a deeper richer look. I do occasionally get annoyed by the pixelations but not too bad and mostly on all white screens, which are rare.
My impression at times is that this will be the last fully exploitable device. The 4g is very fast and is noticabely improved over the 3g, which makes the tether really nice.
I have yet to have one surprise crash... all crashes were while I was doing something weird with the phone or network that was not actually work related.
The device integrates with bluetooth really nicely, works in the car with the mount great. Even in a nice big case that stands it up. At some level, I'm not sure what the Razr would bring to the table. I have not run any sort of speed/benchmark analysis programs and again despite my root adventures am a mostly casual/professional user of the device.
I am not particularly interested in seeing anything else happen to the phone at this point. My biggest concern is that once the OTA is released that I will either be constantly annoyed by it being pushed to the device and/or I will install it and something will go wrong with my setup.
The OG was getting a bit difficult to use with all of the features that I was relying on more and more so this is great and more than enough phone to get me through my day. Being able to tether the small amount of data for free on occasion is the icing on the cake.
I purchased my Bionic 24 hours before I heard about the Razr being announced. After a little fuming at the cliche of a 24 hour scoop like that I settled in to the device and decided against returning it.
I came to the Bionic from the OG (Moto Droid 1). I had been installing ROMs issued by Peter Alfonso. I am a self employed professional user and mainly used the root access for free tethering to my work computer while on the road. I appreciated being able to run the latest/greatest software after Motorola had long stopped tending to the OG and this is why I skipped from G1 to G3/4 (whoever is in charge of the generation numbering can correct me later).
I immediately found a one-click root method for the Bionic and rooted it... tried to tether and FAIL. I saw the discussions about the SQLite hack and considered it but then decided to just unroot and wait for more news.
The more news seemed to be that the OTA was going to permanently disable root access while also bringing a radio 4g/3g switch fix, among other things. I later read that a leaked copy of the OTA was out and saw that there was some favorable feedback about the radio quality.
I decided to go all in... I reverted to stock (there is a one-click app out there that will unbrick and return to stock on the Bionic... this is great... no fear!) and then rooted. I then applied a suggested method to achieve permanent root... which at least worked well enough to apply the leaked update and maintain root. The radio fix seems to be high quality as I stream netflix movies for my kids in the car and it improved the occasional loss of signal/restarts, etc.
I then made the tether work via the SQ hack. So I am now running the latest Bionic software via the leak, with root, and with free tethering. I also have a bootloader that allows for custom roms, etc. but have not installed a custom rom. I am using the extended battery.
With that background... my review:
This is a great damn product. It is very fast and responsive. I like the screen and don't mind the complaints referenced by others on here. It sort of gives everything a deeper richer look. I do occasionally get annoyed by the pixelations but not too bad and mostly on all white screens, which are rare.
My impression at times is that this will be the last fully exploitable device. The 4g is very fast and is noticabely improved over the 3g, which makes the tether really nice.
I have yet to have one surprise crash... all crashes were while I was doing something weird with the phone or network that was not actually work related.
The device integrates with bluetooth really nicely, works in the car with the mount great. Even in a nice big case that stands it up. At some level, I'm not sure what the Razr would bring to the table. I have not run any sort of speed/benchmark analysis programs and again despite my root adventures am a mostly casual/professional user of the device.
I am not particularly interested in seeing anything else happen to the phone at this point. My biggest concern is that once the OTA is released that I will either be constantly annoyed by it being pushed to the device and/or I will install it and something will go wrong with my setup.
The OG was getting a bit difficult to use with all of the features that I was relying on more and more so this is great and more than enough phone to get me through my day. Being able to tether the small amount of data for free on occasion is the icing on the cake.
