Motorola Droid Bionic: Unboxing and First Hands On

The Motorola Droid Bionic is Verizon's first dual-core, LTE phone, a $299 behemoth that wraps together everything the carrier has to offer. Techies on Verizon have been waiting a long time for this phone. Does it live up to the hype?
I've been playing with the Droid Bionic for just a few hours as of this writing, running our benchmarks and testing out the phone's dizzying array of docks. (Look for a story profiling all the docks later today.) And at least at first glance, this looks like the current flagship for the entire Android universe.
The Bionic feels expensive. This phone has more metal and glass than the all-plastic Samsung droid charge, for instance, and at 2.63 by 5 by 0.43 inches (HWD) and 5.6 ounces it's a little bit bigger, but lighter and slimmer than the  The 960-by-640 screen uses Motorola's Pentile pixel arrangement, which some people say makes colored text fuzzy but which has never bothered me.

There's an 8-megapixel camera with 1080p video capture on the back, a VGA camera on the front, and a standard 3.5-mm headset jack on the top, and Motorola says to expect more than a day's worth of use from the 1735 mAh battery. We'll see about that, but the battery is still larger than we've seen in other LTE phones. The Bionic also has Wi-Fi hotspot mode, GPS and all the usual high-end features.
The Bionic runs Motorola's amped-up version of Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread, with a ton of extensions and bloatware. A starring role goes to Motorola's Webtop, the desktop-PC magic that we've seen before in Motorola photon and Atrix phones. When the Bionic snaps into the appropriate dock, it becomes a quasi-desktop PC running the Linux version of Firefox 4, complete with Flash, with Android apps in a window. Like the Atrix, the Bionic also has a $300 laptop dock that turns the phone into a 2.4-pound laptop with more than eight hours of usage time on a charge.
But there's more—so much more that I'm glad this phone comes with 8GB of internal storage and a 16GB memory card. Motorola is promoting ZumoCast, its own app for streaming music, videos, and documents through the cloud from your home PC. Verizon is plugging Netflix, its NFL app, and full streaming TV episodes through Verizon Video. Obviously, all the video streams smoothly on a 4G LTE connection, which I clocked at 15Mbps down using the Speedtest.net app.
I'm concerned that this will be the phone to start showing the limits of Verzion capped data planes. though. With Verizon and Motorola so heavily selling Netflix and Zumocast as major uses for this device, owners will have to keep a close eye on their data usage.
The Bionic's benchmark performance is outstanding. The phone runs on a 1-GHz TI OMAP4 dual-core chipset, similar to the motorola droid 3. Like the Droid 3, the Bionic posted slightly better scores on the AnTuTu system benchmark than other dual-core phones, with improvements primarily coming in memory and database access. Browsermark Web browsing benchmark scores were the fastest I've seen on any phone yet, and I got a better frame rate on the NenaMark 2 graphics benchmark (28.2) than on other dual-core phones.
There are a few minor missing pieces here, most notably a kickstand. You might think Motorola's trying to sell docks, which of course they are. The lack of a kickstand is annoying, though, because the phone's main speaker is on the back, which means it's muffled if you lay it down on a table.
But here's the hard call: is the Droid Bionic worth its unusually high $299 price? Obviously, if you intend to use Webtop, no other Verizon phone can compare. But I'll have to spend some time comparing things like Web page load times to the Droid Charge we have in house, to see if the dual-core processor really makes a difference.
The Motorola Droid Bionic goes on sale on Thursday, Sept. 8. I'll have a full review of the phone later this week. There's a lot to get through here! For now, though, take a look at our unboxing slideshow above.