At a cozy penthouse theater at New York City’s Lincoln Center, the press gathered for hands on demos of the three newest additions to Verizon’s Droid line.
While the brief presentation hosted by Jeffrey Dietel, Motorola Vice President of Marketing, crowed about what was new in Motorola and Verizon’s partnership, there was an aged undertone.
The PA blasted songs of early ’00s from Sigur Ros and Portishead, as if Motorola were trying to invoke the heady days when Razr feature phones ruled the mobile market.
Was it all just bluster, or does the Droid Ultra phone, the subject of our hands on here, feel like the handheld that can return Motorola to its glory days? Neither really. Droid Ultra isn’t a savior, but it still feels like a nice piece of kit.
Hardware
Falling in the middle of its siblings, the smaller Droid Mini and the battery-pack toting Droid Maxx, the Droid Ultra is impressively light. Dietel was quick to boast that the Ultra will be the “thinnest 4G LTE phone” on the market when it releases on Aug. 20, with an expansive 5-inch screen in a body that’s just a mere 7.18mm thick.
Both red and black models were on display, but the red in particular showed off the handheld’s fetching Kevlar-weave body. As with previous Droids, the Ultra has a screen made out of Corning’s durable Gorilla Glass. The Android 4.2.2 machine’s also been treated with what Motorola representative Jeff Snow described as a water-resistant nanocoating to protect the device from spills.
Rick Osterioh, Motorola’s Senior Vice President of Product Management, gave some loose figures regarding the computational horsepower in the new Droid Ultra. It’s GPU is 100 percent faster than the 304MHz PowerVR SGX540 that worked through proprietary apps and Android games alike on the Droid 4.
CPU processing speeds improved 24 percent in the Ultra as well. The hardware running the phone is Motorola’s new 8-core X8, a single die with 4 GPUs, 2 CPUs devoted to running applications, 1 processor for contextual computing, and 1 final devoted language processing unit.
Ultra soft(ware)
In toying with the new software leveraging these processors, the Droid Ultra proved itself a speedy device. The new Active Display feature – which has notifications, the time, weather, and other info illuminated on just a part of the screen when the phone is locked – worked almost instantaneously.
When looking at a notification on the locked Ultra, pressing down with a finger would bring up more information like who a photo was sent from. The info disappears the second your finger lifts off the screen.
Unlocking the machine, shuffling through the app menus, and the brief device tutorials that flashed on the screen all felt instantaneously fast. It’s an ideal operating speed, in that it’s so fast that you don’t think about what you’re doing.
The other highlighted new feature was Touchless Control. Taking advantage of the handheld’s devoted language processor, this voice command tool built into all the new Droids can listen to your voice from up to 15-feet away.
Even in a room full of noisy journalists and PR agents, the Touchless Control worked well, turning on via voice commands, doing basic web searches, or even playing an escalating tone when you use the finder feature Call My Phone.
It’s impossible to say how well Touchless Control works in the wild, though, since the Droid Ultra can only learn a single voice. This means that families that like to play with voice command features like Siri will be out of luck with Touchless Control, much like we was since we weren’t able to sample the voice set up process on the demo units.
The final new software feature Motorola was demoing was Droid Zap, a new sharing tool that lets all Droid owners “instantly” send each other photos and videos as long as they’re within 300 feet. Swipe two fingers up on a photo in your gallery, it gets zapped over the cloud using your Google Account, then you give your friend with a Droid a shout that the image is sent.
Swipe two fingers downward and the Ultra scans for any available images. Little up and down arrows appear in the upper left corner of the screen indicating outbound or incoming Zap images.
Motorola said that a separate app will be made available for Android-based phones for Zap sharing with Droids. Instant is a too generous a descriptor for Zap, though. In our demo it still took awhile for two Ultras right next to each other to recognize an image was sent.
Early Verdict
Ultra will keep the Droid name relevant but this demo wasn’t enough to prove it can help pick Motorola up from the $342 million earnings loss it caused Google.
The new model feels slick and lightning fast, but without knowing how it holds up under the rigors of constant use, there’s no saying whether or not its quality matches its first impression.
The same goes for its big new features like Touchless Control and Droid Zap. They work well in a demo setting, but how about when you’re just messing around? If you’re a Droid veteran and have an upcoming Verizon upgrade, it may be worth taking the plunge, but anyone thinking about dropping bucks on a new handset may want to go with a proven commodity.
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