Motorola Droid X: Thoroughly Reviewed

Micro HDMI Out

So what about that micro HDMI port on the device? The X joins a small number of smartphones packing an HDMI port of the micro variety. I’m going to start by just noting that it’s very difficult to find one of these cables except at a carrier store. Ironically, I got Anand’s HTC EVO 4G the same day I was planning on doing media center testing with the X and proceeded to spend the next few hours searching for a cable - neither the X nor the EVO bundle even an adapter. I ended up having luck at a Sprint store - point is that these cables aren’t very popular yet.

So how does HDMI out work? Its functionality is very basic right now and is limited largely to playing back a slideshow of photos from the gallery application, or video playback. I found that although the pictures slideshow worked fine, the transitions were slightly low framerate, the photos never filled up my display entirely (not even aspect ratio correct stretched, just centered and small), and generally it left me wondering why anyone wouldn’t just use DLNA to view them over something else. Maybe throw in some Ken Burns effect eyecandy, Motorola?

Videos captured on the phone itself played like I expected them to and sounded excellent as well.

Motorola will have a media dock available which promises a few more things, specifically audio playback, but without rooting and modding the device HDMI out is a bit limited. You can’t make the entire Android interface appear on your TV, for example.

There’s an HDMI settings menu in the settings menu. Inside, you can set the video output format to a maximum of 720P. I left it on automatic. There’s no other configuration here - nothing for whether you want HDMI to be the device’s sound out method, video out method, or anything else. It’s just this.

While the EVO supports YouTube over HDMI, the X does not. Videos that you can browse to and open with a file browser play over HDMI whenever the cable is connected. I had the most success with MP4 videos using the H.264 codec at 1500 kbps. I tried every type of audio profile but couldn’t get surround working on the X - for whatever reason I could only get stereo.

The music player also for whatever reason doesn’t play over HDMI when the cable is connected. However, with a bit of trickery I could get pandora or whatever audio I wanted playing over the HDMI out. Just fire up the music, then fire up gallery. Boom, all your audio will go over HDMI. It’s handy I guess if you’ve got an A/V receiver but don’t have a headphone 1/8” audio cable laying around.

When you’re doing anything that has HDMI output enabled (the photo gallery or video playback), the device turns into a basic control interface like I showed before. There are some monstrous buttons and one at the top left to exit out of HDMI playback.  

Remember HTC’s excuse that the reason for the 30 FPS framerate cap was HDMI video playback? I was curious and used the Droid2Dtest application others have used on the EVO which showed the 30 FPS cap on the X.

The X is capped to 60 FPS, unlike the EVO’s 30, as shown in the overlaid screenshots above which I've annotated. Yep.

Perhaps the discrepancy is that HTC needed the 30 FPS cap for YouTube playback (which the X lacks). Either way, it’s clear that the reason HTC was capping the EVO is a bit more complicated than just for HDMI out. It’s also possible that the SoC difference is the case - remember that the Snapdragon SoC has the Adreno 200 GPU whereas the OMAP 3630 in the X has PowerVR SGX 530. It’s entirely possible HTC’s cap was there for hardware limitation reasons.

Motorola's Gallery

I mentioned the gallery while talking about HDMI out - it isn’t the Android gallery experienced on stock devices. Motorola has clearly rolled something of its own, and though it isn’t as flashy, it does get the job done.

I also noticed that it seemed a bit faster at loading previews than the stock android gallery, though at times I was still left staring at a ton of blank thumbnails.