Review: Motorola Droid 4 for Verizon Wireless
Browser
The stock Android browser works very well on the Droid 4. When surfing on Verizon's 3G network, I found pages to load in a reasonable amount of time, though the full HTML desktop version of sites such as CNN were slowed down by ads. I noticed a few hiccups when streaming music over 3G. On Wi-Fi, the Droid 4 surfed at blazing speeds.
As for surfing on Verizon's LTE 4G network, it was an excellent performer. Most web sites loaded in a few seconds, apps downloaded from the Android Market in a jiffy, and streamed music was hiccup-free.
Customize
The Droid 4 offers users plenty of room to adjust the phone's appearance, behavior and functionality. The items unique to the Droid 4 include several re-sizable Motorola widgets, such as the social networking widget, the favorites widget, the photo gallery widget (which also includes friends' Facebook photos,) and so on.
The Smart Actions tools also offer an interesting way to set up automatic controls over select behaviors of the Droid 4. Smart Actions lets you set up "triggers" to control a range of phone features. Here's how it works.
You set up a rule for the phone. Rules are things such as muting all alerts, or dimming the display, or switching to Car mode, or automatically playing music. Once you set a rule, you then choose a trigger that forces the phone to follow the rule.
Rules can be applied to the text messaging application, notifications, ringtones, wallpapers, application launcher, browser, display/brightness settings, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth radios, and so on. Triggers for the rules can be set to the occur based on the battery level, incoming/missed calls, motion detection, time of the day, etc.