I recently saw the ad from Verizon showing the new droid phone that was being released soon, the HTC DNA. Well it was only 2 weeks after that, with much soul searching I decided to retire my trusty Iphone 4 and upgrade to a new droid. I had my heart set on the Samsung Galaxy 3 but then when I saw the DNA I started doing research on it. After much research I decided that the DNA would be my next phone. I wanted to go and test it though before I bought it and make sure it was not too big. It is a huge 5 inch phone with a massive screen and a beautiful picture. All of the reviews said do not worry about the size, it is still small for being such a large phone. So after I got a chance to stop to a store and play with the phone and try it out, I was sold on it.
My wife came home from work and we went right to the Verizon phone to order us up some new phones. She got her Samsung galaxy 3 in white and I got my shiny new Droid DNA phone. Her phone is a nice phone too. I love how it feels so thin and lightweight but does not feel like it was made cheaply. Samsung displays are some of the best around when looking at a computer all day, and the display on her phone was no different. I will review that phone more in depth when I can get a day with it and pry it out of her fingers!
The DNA phone came in some neat packaging that was dark and black and really cool looking. I got Verizon to transfer all my contacts from my iPhone, which I should not have done as the backup of contacts was not updated like what i had on my iphone. Triplicate entries galore! The phone came and had about a half charge on the battery. Which was a good indication of things to come. I got the phone at 4 o'clock and used it heavily right up till I went to bed at 10 pm. And just as I was laying in bed it was telling me that it was time to charge.
My first experience of the pure speed this phone had was at a supermarket. I had 3 bars and it was on the 4g network and it dawned on me that I needed to get an app for my work. I wanted to hear a good dance DJ on sound cloud as well. So I went into Google play and chose sound cloud from the list of apps. The app to download was 14MB in size. I was curious how log it would take with only half of the network signal available to me. I hit download and it only took 10 seconds for the app to download and be ready for me to work with! That was impressive to me as I came from an I phone 4 with 3g speeds. When I got home, I could not really test the 4g more as we live in an area that has poor coverage and sometimes its a miracle to get 3g coverage. So I connected it to Wi Fi and downloaded all my needed apps.
All the apps I tested ran smoothly with no issues. The only one that gives me an issue so far is Facebook. When you go to share a picture that is in your timeline, it will come up and you can put a wording to the post, but when you hit publish post. It says finished then says loading and never moves from there until you force quit the app and start it again. Your post does show up but you won't know that until you exit out and come back in. This issue came up on my phone, my wife's phone and her co worker's phone. All are droid phones and all are different models and one is on a different network. Needless to say, I reported that bug to Facebook and I hope they will get a fix out for it. It is not a big deal to me as I have plenty of other ways to use Facebook should the need arise.
My phone will last all day and a charger is not needed unless I am doing some intense activity with the phone like streaming music all day or running the display for a very long time. The biggest draw in the phones battery life is that big beautiful screen. For my work around a 2nd charger will be ordered and I will keep my car charger handy for long trips.
A lot of the reviews I have studied have talked about the phones inability to add storage space and that it only has 16gb of space available to the user. If your coming from the basic iPhone like i was this is not an issue. I can get at least 200 songs on the phone plus my apps and still have a little room left over to store some other things if needed. And with today's cloud storage offerings, you should have space somewhere to put your data so you can shuffle it around to the phone if needed. Would a 32GB version be better? Sure, and I am positive that the engineers are already working that up right now. But for me 16GB is fine. I don't really want to store a lot of music on this phone anyway. I want to have more of a balance and get some reading material on there and try all the different apps that I did not have available to me with the iPhone world. I mean c'mon, with that huge screen, who wouldn't want to curl up with that phone and read some classic novels, or catch up on the latest issue of Maximum PC?
The phone is of course very deeply entrenched into the Google arena. If you have a g mail account and have looked through Google's pages, you know you have email storage and some other apps open to you. I got a g mail account almost 4 years ago and at that same time started using their Chrome browser. It has been a great choice for me as I can store all of my bookmarks on Chrome and they all follow me wherever I go and on which ever device I fire up. It is so nice to not have to download a separate app to play you tube videos! And while Im on the go, there is a blogger app to run on the phone should I be crazy enough to want to thumb type that much for a quick blog post!
The swype input method is cool and I am getting better with it everyday. I try to use that more so I get better at it and it is easier to do at times then pecking with the old trusty thumbs!
This phone was a wonderful choice and is right now the fastest droid out there. I would say its the biggest but Samsung has the Note II which is 6.5 inches and as a hybrid tablet phone (Phablet)? Thone? It is bigger than this phone. I am giving this phone a recommendation of buy and would not be afraid to tell my family to get the phone. I will post more updates as I use the phone more and update if facebook gets their app working again.
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