Verizon customers now have two 4G Android smartphones to choose from: the HTC Thunderbolt ($249.99, 4 stars), our current Editors' Choice, and the $299.99 Samsung Droid Charge, which is Samsung's first LTE device, and first officially designated Droid device for Verizon. The two cell phones are pretty similar, but not identical. While the HTC Thunderbolt retains a slight edge, you'll be thrilled with either device.
Design, Screen, and Call Quality
The Samsung Droid Charge measures 5.1 by 2.6 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 5 ounces. That makes it almost an ounce and a half lighter than the HTC Thunderbolt, but even slightly taller. The Droid Charge isn't as impressive looking, though, mainly thanks to its all-plastic design (save for the glass screen). The chrome trim around the edge and the glossy, tapered cover on back feel a bit cheap and seem to scratch easily.
The 4.3-inch, 480-by-800-pixel, Super AMOLED Plus capacitive touch screen is just as vibrant as other recent Samsung phones. The deep blacks and vibrant colors look great, and overshadow even the Thunderbolt's excellent screen. There are four plastic buttons beneath the screen. I like these better than the Samsung Galaxy S's finicky touch buttons, but HTC's haptic feedback-enabled design beats them both. Typing on the on-screen QWERTY keyboard was easy in both portrait and landscape modes, and dialing phone numbers was very fast.
The Droid Charge is a dual-band EV-DO Rev A (850/1900 MHz) and 4G LTE device with 802.11b /g/n Wi-Fi. With the LTE radio, Verizon says to expect download speeds in the 5 to 12 Mbps range, and upload speeds between 2 and 5 Mbps. We've gotten even higher speeds in some tests, though. You can also use the Droid Charge as a mobile hotspot with the appropriate plan; it can support up to 10 devices when running 4G, or five devices when in 3G mode. Interestingly, Verizon is promising to throw in the mobile hotspot feature for a limited time, instead of charging an extra $20 per month; that's a great deal, assuming you want that feature (and you do).
Voice quality was very good: crisp, clear, and loud in the earpiece. Callers had no trouble understanding me, either, although one caller said that I sounded a little thin through the microphone. Reception was solid. Callers sounded clear through an Aliph Jawbone Icon Bluetooth headset ($99, 4 stars). The speakerphone went loud enough to use outside, but it sounded over-compressed and muffled. Voice dialing took several tries over Bluetooth to get the right number. I'm not sure why this is, but it could have something to do with the way the Droid Charge activates and deactivates its power-saving algorithm, as some of the Jawbone Icon's voice prompts were partially cut off.
We got some strange battery life results in our tests. The Droid Charge has a larger battery than the HTC Thunderbolt, 1600mAh compared to the Thunderbolt's 1400mAh. We saw very good standby and regular-usage time on the Charge - after a full day of sitting around, its battery life didn't drop much. But we repeatedly got short talk time results of between 4 hours, 15 minutes and 4 hours, 28 minutes, which is much shorter than we got on the Thunderbolt. Seeing those, we can't recommend this phone to people dissatisfied with the Thunderbolt's battery life; we'd expect the two phones to have similar experiences.
Hardware, OS, and Apps
Under the hood, the Droid Charge has the same 1GHz Cortex A8-based Hummingbird CPU found in half a dozen Galaxy S handsets over the past year. By now, it would have been nice to see an upgrade. The Droid Charge runs Android 2.2 (Froyo); there's no word yet on an Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) update. On our benchmark test suite, this phone tested slightly slower overall than the Thunderbolt, which packs a second-generation 1GHz Snapdragon CPU.
Samsung treads a bit more lightly than HTC with its UI layer. Most of the apps are stock, albeit with minor color or graphic enhancements. This is good and bad; I missed HTC's excellent address book layout, which looks livelier and makes it easier to access a contact's history than Samsung's does. The Droid Charge continues Samsung's tradition of wrapping menu icons in colored blocks. The seven customizable home screens work well.
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