[Full Droid Review] Released in November 2009, the Droid by Motorola is the first in Verizon's growing series new of Droid phones. The Motorola Droid smartphone comes loaded with Google Android 2.0 with Motorola's Motoblur UI. Inside is a 600MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 3430 processor with 256MB of RAM and 512MB of ROM. Its color transflective TFT display has an FWVGA 480x854 resolution and measures 3.7-inches. The Droid phone also features a five-megapixel camera with LED flash and a landscape slide out QWERTY keyboard with a directional pad. Read on for the latest Motorola Droid reviews, smartphone news and videos:
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by Legacy | February 5, 2012 5:51 PMRead StorySince the days of gray scale LCD screens on PDAs, the stylus has been the invaluable tool which allowed you to precisely navigate the small screen. With killer applications like the venerable PhatWare Calligrapher, which converts hand writing to text, you can use the stylus to mimic the analog world of pen and paper. Along, with integration of cell phone technology, the hope of a converged hand held device for your mobile life was starting to become a reality. As cellular data and push email where implemented, the world was starting to be at one's stylus tip. Microsoft along with Palm were ...
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by Stephen Schenck | December 21, 2011 5:37 PMRead StoryEarlier this month, we got an official update on the progress towards the next major release of CyanogenMod, now incorporating Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The news about CM9 wasn't all good for everyone, as owners of the original "OG" Motorola Droid learned their smartphones would no longer be seeing CyanogenMod support. Considering the phone's limited hardware, with a pretty severe RAM bottleneck, that shouldn't have been surprising to hear, though it was unfortunate all the same. Of course, just because the phone won't get CM9 doesn't mean that other devs won't be working on an Ice ...
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by Anton D. Nagy | December 3, 2011 2:34 AMRead StoryWe've already seen the recent Bit9 study which unveiled popular Android smartphones being vulnerable to malware exploits and hacking attempts and now it's time for a North Carolina State University research to raise a couple of questions regarding pre-installed software. Researchers Michael Grace, Yajin Zhou, Zhi Wang, and Xuxian Jiang at NCSU analyzed popular smartphones: HTC Legend, HTC EVO 4G, HTC Wildfire S, Motorola Droid, Motorola Droid X, Samsung Epic 4G, Google Nexus One and Google Nexus S. The research found that while the model implementation of Android on Google's own handsets ...
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by Stephen Schenck | November 18, 2011 9:32 PMRead Story
This time last week, we heard about Motorola's efforts to recruit owners of the original Droid for their participation in a special project of some kind. It wasn't spelled-out directly, but based on how Motorola's run soak tests in the past, we had a feeling that's what we were in for. A new update in the works for a two-year-old Android struck us as some unusual behavior, and got us wondering about just what the contents of the update could be. An official release of Gingerbread seemed like a long shot, though not impossible, and we were left anxiously awaiting to hear further news of ...
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by Stephen Schenck | November 11, 2011 7:53 PMRead StoryOnce in a while, we'll see a smartphone manufacturer come out with an unexpected update for an aging handset. While we harp on those companies for often taking so long to release updates in the first place, it's a great feeling when they finally arrive, breathing some new life into old hardware. Past a certain point, though, any sensible person gives up hope of ever seeing official updates released again. If you've been feeling that way about a first-gen Motorola Droid you've been holding onto, there may be a surprise in your future, as there are signs that Motorola's got something special ...
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by Brandon Miniman | July 7, 2011 8:18 AMRead StoryThe original Motorola Droid, released in the fall of 2009, was the first in a long line of Android-powered devices that helped Verizon create a brand that is now used, in some (frustrating) cases, as the generic word to describe any phone running Android ("Hey dude...is that a Droid?" "Uhm, it's an Inspire 4G. It runs Android, so yes, it's a Droid!"). The original Droid, much like its two successors (the Droid 2 and the recently announced Droid 3), have kept with the same form factor: side-sliding QWERTY. Each new generation of Droid has upped the ante in terms of specs, with the latest ...
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by Stephen Schenck | June 5, 2011 9:22 PMRead StoryMotorola's Droid 3 turned up in a couple pics last month, with a new, larger screen. Details on the smartphone are still sparse, but there's some new evidence suggesting that a release could be nearer than we might have thought, as a supplier of OEM phone components has the whole Droid 3 screen assembly up for sale. According to Global Direct Parts, the Droid 3 will expand the 3.7-inch screen on previous Droids to a little-more-modern four inches, along with a bump to qHD resolution. This will also be the first of the basic Droid models to include a front-facing camera for video chats. ...
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by Stephen Schenck | May 26, 2011 5:20 PMRead StorySure, you can pull a little slight-of-Android-hand and get Netflix's new streaming app to work on a non-approved smartphone, but luckily for the many Android users who just want to download an app and have it work - no fiddling required - Netflix is busy expanding the list of approved devices. Its most recent update, published to the Market today, adds support for three more smartphones. When the app first launched, it supported streaming playback on the following Androids: HTC Incredible with Android 2.2 HTC Nexus One with Android 2.2, 2.3 HTC Evo 4G with Android 2.2 HTC G2 ...
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by Stephen Schenck | May 12, 2011 7:47 PMRead StoryJust hours after Netflix released its Android app with full streaming video support on select Android models, hackers have already enabled the app to work on an additional set of officially unsupported smartphones. If you've got a Motorola Droid, Droid 2, or Droid X, and you're running Gingerbread thanks to a ROM like CyanogenMod 7, you'll now be able to stream Netflix to your smartphone (with the proper Netflix account, of course). The geniuses who lurk in the XDA-Developers forum managed to crack the device checks for these handsets, reaffirming what we learned earlier from Netflix, that ...
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by GabePeters | April 26, 2011 6:00 PMRead StoryAustralian Motorola Atrix 4G owner Irwin Proud quickly discovered that it's bootloader was locked after his purchase of the device earlier this year. In response, he formed a "Groubal" page to attempt to get the attention of Motorola and convince it that there is a large subset of users who wish to develop for the Atrix and cannot due to the immutable security. The Groubal page has grown quickly, currently at over 8800 signatures since it's inception on March 31st. Motorola has since taken notice, and has issued a response: "...It is our intention to enable the unlockable/relockable ...
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by Chuong Nguyen | March 30, 2011 2:28 PMRead StoryIf you're holding off on the Motorola Droid 2, which launched with Android 2.2 Froyo and support for Adobe Flash out of the box, you may want to wait just a little longer if limited edition phones are your thing. The R2-D2 edition, an homage to the Droid name that the handset bears, is slated for September 30th. The photo above shows the device's back side. (via: Android Central)
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by Chuong Nguyen | March 28, 2011 2:51 PMRead StoryThe Motorola Droid on Verizon Wireless is the world's first phone running on the next generation Android 2.0 operating system, which offers an evolutionary and incremental upgrade to previous Android 1.5 and 1.6 firmwares. The phone itself is gorgeous with strong angular lines, reminiscent in the wildly popular RAZR consumer flip phone in the earlier part of the decade. Motorola's new smartphone is a gorgeous slab touchscreen device with a thin profile. Looking at the device's thinness, you would never guess that there is a sliding keyboard, but there is underneath the 16:9 aspect ratio ...
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by GabePeters | March 20, 2011 10:57 PMRead StoryEnterprising hacker William "nenolod" Pitcock has been hard at work on the Motorola signed bootloader issue and has now posted a method that can be used to obtain the private key for the "sholes" platform. Vulnerable devices include the Droid, Milestone, Droid X, Droid 2, and CHARM. Having the private key allows custom ROM images to be signed and accepted by the bootloader to flash to the device. It is currently unknown if the same vulnerability applies to recent and upcoming devices such as the Atrix or Bionic. Motorola was notified about the vulnerability privately three times prior to ...
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by Brandon Miniman | March 15, 2011 3:27 PMRead StoryThe Droid--the device that arguably first brought awareness to the Android platform--is getting a proper successor today: the Motorola Droid 2. The Droid 2 features an updated, less cluttered keyboard design compared to the original Droid. It'll be one of the first devices to come with Android 2.2. Beyond that, it has a 3.7" WVGA capacitive display and 8GB of onboard memory with an extra 8GB included on microS. The new Droid 2 phone should feel faster with a bumped up 1GHz TI OMAP CPU, and 512MB of RAM for multitasking fun. It'll also come preloaded with Swype (one of our favorite ...
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by Joe Levi | March 9, 2011 12:11 PMRead StoryIf you've got a Motorola DROID Original and are wondering about updates to your device, you haven't been forgotten! According to Verizon, an update titled "FRG83G" will begin rolling out to customers today. No, it's not Android 2.3 Gingerbread, rather it's Android 2.2.2 Froyo -- which includes various fixes and well as a patch for the vulnerability that was recently exploited in the Android Market. The update is fairly small, weighing in at only 3.4MB. To see if you're eligible to download the patch open Settings, About phone, System updates. If "no updates are available" it's either not ...