Cam_Boy

I'm looking to get the bionic next week and was wondering if anyone has it and could offer some of their thoughts, good or bad.

DTN

Don't buy Motorola. They are known for locking down bootloaders. They are known for inferior products. The Motorola devices don't offer much.



My suggestion is to wait two months until newer ICS based devices start arising. The Galaxy Nexus is to be released in two weeks. There's no confirmation that any other device will be upgradable to Android 4.0. Only speculation.

300D50

I beg to differ.



First phone was a Moto V9m, never had ANY problems. My whole immediate family has nothing but Moto, no issues, except the one that took a dive into a beer glass. It lived for another 2 years before dieing randomly. My dad's phone has been drove over, burried, dropped in water, shocked, overheated, etc. No real issues except a scratched case and scratchy external speaker.



I started my android run with a D1, I'm on the DroidMod dev team (I go by the handle SGX if you care), never had any problems that weren't user induced, or fixed by the next Google-released android update.



I bought a Bionic in September, and I can honestly say, unless you NEED to mess with the kernel, the locked-down bootloader isn't that big a deal. You can root, there is a bootstrap for the recovery, and you can flash back to stock at a moments notice, just like usual. There are already custom roms floating around as well.



I won't lie, it ticks me off to no end since I'm a low-level kernel dev who likes to tinker, but the functionality of the phone is still more than adequate for even my demanding use cases.



</rant>

187sks

My last 5 phones before my current HTC were Motorola phones. My first was a Startac which I loved and lived through everything. The next phones all died before I made it to the 2 year free upgrade point. I will never buy another Motorola device again.

DTN

Flashing a custom ROM on a motorola is like painting your house. Flashing a custom ROM on devices without bootloader locks is like gutting the inside of the house, remodeling and then hiring an interior decorator to finish the job. A locked kernel means you can't really do any development.

optimoprime

i like bionics. its a fast phone thats dual core and 4g. honestly i dont care for HTC if anything they just dont offer much in terms of hardware or batterylife. i'm not into messing with the phones though, i just sell them. if you are just standard user whos not trying to root or mess with phone its an awsome device.

DTN

It could be faster. We suck the last drop of performance out of our Samsung and some HTC devices on XDA.



Its like a car. Would you buy onethat came with a Turbo charger and a locked trunk that you would t ever be able to use? I'd stay away from those on principal alone. Not that I'm Modding my device every day.... I want the options.

optimoprime

i see the point, i guess i was always under the impression that the main point of rooting was to "overclock?" the processer so you could speed it up. but if you already have a dualcore 1ghz processor why mess with it?



i know you know what your talking about so its kind of hard to conversate about something i have only minimal knowledge about. i like phones but i'm not INTO phones. i just sell em, any thoughts on the new droid razr? or nexus prime phones??

DTN

There's guys out there who will design custom kernels and add features which the manufacturer never thought of.. Say, lighting up LEDs when you get a message, or blinking the charge light until you check your phone. There's tweaks to GPS accuracy.. Blocking adds from appearing in apps... speeding up inter-process communications and all kinds of tweaks you can do... Say the GPS sends 10 messages every time it's used, because the manufacturer left a test mode on, but it only needs 1 or 2.. People change that.



Personally, I run a stock ROM with a custom kernel.. That's the car equivalent of a "sleeper" with an engine swap. Everything works like it should, performance increases and minor background tweaks.



Droid Razr is another Motorola device. Stay away from it.





From what I gather, Nexus Prime is a code name. The device will be Galaxy Nexus. Galaxy Nexus has an OMAP 4460 processor which is technically a quad-core processor. 2 A9 cores for application processing and 2 smaller M3 cores for real-time video and image processing. This seems like a good device. I could go on quite a bit about it, but it seems like I'd want it for my next device.



I'd stay away from GalaxyS2, as the GalaxyS3 will be released soon. Looks like Samsung is producing the best devices currently though.

optimoprime

i have an x2 right now thinking of switching to my backup which is a charge. any thoughts?