Motorola Droid 2 Global (Verizon Wireless)

The Motorola Droid 2 Global is Verizon's premiere business phone. If you're a corporate customer, and your company doesn't require you to get a BlackBerry, this is the cell phone you need. It makes the cut for our list of The 10 Best Phones with Keyboards, Phones With the Best Battery Life, and The Best Phones on Verizon Wireless. But it isn't perfect. If you're picky about your voice quality, you may want to shop around.

Design, Features, and Voice Performance
The Droid 2 Global is very similar to our previous Editors' Choice, the Motorola Droid 2 ($149, 4 stars). The handsets have almost exactly the same body, but the Droid 2 is more powerful. Motorola has clocked the TI OMAP 3640 processor from 1GHz up to 1.2GHz and folded in a world-ready HSPA 7.2 modem somehow without making the phone any larger, though it's a touch heavier than its predecessor at 4.6 by 2.4 by .5 inches (HWD) and 6.1 ounces.

Just like the Droid 2, the Global is a sliding-keyboard smartphone with a 3.7-inch, 854-by-480 screen, made of classy-looking metal and plastic. There's a SIM card slot and MicroSD memory card slot under the sliding metal back. The four-row QWERTY keyboard is quite good; I like the keyboard on the Samsung Epic 4G ($249, 4 stars) better, but it's very easy to type on the Droid 2 Global.

The Droid 2 Global connects to Verizon's CDMA EVDO Rev A network here in the States and to CDMA, GSM or HSPA 900/2100 networks abroad. (No, the GSM side doesn't work on AT&T or T-Mobile—only foreign networks.) It also has Wi-Fi 802/11 b/g/n. Basically, it'll work anywhere, as long as you're okay with the roaming rates.

Reception on the Droid 2 Global is fine, but voice quality on the the earpiece isn't great. Voices sounded muddy and indistinct in my tests, which was frustrating. Attaching an Aliph Jawbone Icon Bluetooth headset helped, and voice dialing worked through the headset as well. Transmissions from the phone's mic came through with some background noise, but my voice was completely audible in a noisy situation. The speakerphone is clearer than the earpiece; it goes up to a decent outdoor volume, and transmissions sounded clear. The Droid 2 Global achieved one of the top battery life scores I've ever seen on a business-class Android phone—8 hours, 33 minutes of talk time and more than a day of standby.

With the appropriate service plan, the Droid 2 Global works as a Wi-Fi hotspot. The phone comes with a Verizon SIM card that works with Verizon's own global plans, such as the $64.99 per month GlobalEmail plan; if you want to unlock it and put in your own SIM card, you can call Verizon and do that once you've had the phone for 60 days.

Software and Business Features
The Droid 2 Global runs Android 2.2 with Motorola's business and social-networking extensions and a few Verizon apps thrown in, as well. The social-networking suite, which is called Motoblur on other phones (although Motorola doesn't use the name here) combines various Web mail accounts, social networks, and even multiple Exchange accounts. You get a unified contact book which shows your friends' status messages, and you can reply to Facebook and Twitter direct messages as if they were e-mail messages. The contact book links similar profiles, eliminating duplicates. There's also a file browser, task manager, and built-in IPSec VPN support.

The 1.2GHz processor is less of a big deal than you might think, because it's just a clock-speed bump and not an architecture change. The Droid 2 Global scored higher on the Softweg CPU benchmark and other CPU-specific benchmarks than any other Android phone I've seen except for the T-Mobile myTouch 4G ($199, 4.5 stars), which is only clocked at 1GHz, but with a different architecture. But graphics, memory, and file system performance scores were comparable to the Droid 2 and Droid X.

What does that faster CPU get you? I didn't have a Droid 2 immediately available to test against, but I was impressed by how fast Flash elements appeared on Web pages. For once Flash felt manageable, not sluggish. Don't expect a huge improvement over other state-of-the-art smartphones, though.

Multimedia and Conclusions
With 8GB on board, plus an 8GB memory card which you can upgrade to 32GB, the Droid 2 Global has plenty of room for media. The device uses the stock Android 2.2 music player, which falls short of Motorola's and Samsung's players when it comes to features and compatibility. It's fine for music, playing all popular formats including OGG and WMV, but unlike Motorola's own player it doesn't auto-capture lyrics and album art. Thanks to Motorola's "enhanced audio quality" software, music sounded unusually good through Altec Lansing BackBeat Bluetooth headphones.

The video player handles MPEG4 files in full-screen mode, but not H.264, WMV, or XVID/DIVX, so make sure your videos are encoded correctly. Just like on the Droid 2, the built-in YouTube client plays HQ videos in full screen. Flash videos on Web pages also looked good and played unusually smoothly thansk to the 1.2GHz processor.

The Droid 2 Global uses the same camera module as the Droid 2, which is of decent but not best-in-class quality. Photos are relatively sharp including in low light, but when you zoom in, there's quite a bit of color noise. Just like the Droid 2, the Global records 720-by-480 video at a smooth 30 frames per second outdoors, but more jittery 17 frame-per-second video indoors in low light.

The Droid 2 Global gets our Editor's Choice as the top smartphone with a keyboard on Verizon Wireless. It replaces the Droid 2 in that regard for obvious reasons: this is pretty much like the Droid 2 but better. That said, there are reasons you might want other Verizon smartphones. The Motorola Droid X has a bigger screen, a better camera, and higher voice quality, but you lose the keyboard and global capability. Truly old-school, no-nonsense business folks will still want to go for the global BlackBerry Bold 9650 ($99.99, 3.5 stars), with its unparalleled battery life and excellent voice quality.

Compare the Motorola Droid 2 Global with several other mobile phones side by side.

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