Back to Branding

The back of the Droid has a lot of branding (8): Motorola, Verizon, and Google. Inside the battery case, the words "Motorola Engineering" are embossed in the plastic.

The camera (9) has 5 megapixels with autofocus. Looking just at the camera hardware, the components Motorola picked are nice. The autofocus module and imager are quite good, but the image tuning (which happens in software) isn't quite there yet. Despite the good hardware, the pictures taken on the Droid look as if they were taken with an old cameraphone, with a lot of grainy noise and poor coloration. Meanwhile, the Droid has a flash (10), but it doesn't do very much. It's basically a "party flash" -- a fun effect, but you can't generate enough power with an LED to make much of a difference in a real low-light environment. Chalk all this up as another instance of the Droid offering an impressive list of features, but clearly revealing itself as a first-generation product.

Text: Gregor Berkowitz/MOTO Development