Motorola Droid Turbo 2



Verizon's line of Droid phones just celebrated its sixth birthday, and what better way to celebrate than by releasing the best device to ever bear the Droid title? I jokingly called Motorola's Droid Turbo 2 "a Moto X Pure on steroids," but there's no denying it packs even more power than its predecessor into a body that's built to take a beating. Throw in a battery rated for 48 hours and we should be left with a phone that will make Moto X owners rue the day they whipped out their credit cards, right? Turns out, the answer's a little more complicated.
Pros
  • Durable screen
  • Fast performance
  • Solid, if overstated, battery life
  • Useful software additions
 
Cons
  • Camera is hit or miss
  • Expensive for what it is
  • Slightly dim, oversaturated display
  • Loads of Verizon bloatware

Summary

It's not hard to look at the Droid Turbo 2 as an upgraded version of the Moto X Pure, with its more powerful components, big battery and shatterproof screen. This all sounds great, and it is... until you discover that the battery life isn't always as epic as Motorola claims and that camera performance is a mixed bag. What's more, it's unclear when the phone will receive a software update, and it's saddled with Verizon bloatware. It's still a decent choice, but we ultimately like the regular Moto X even better.
I'll be blunt: the Droid Turbo 2 ($624 and up) is pretty ugly. If you took a Moto X Pure edition and somehow sucked out most of its charm, you'd be left with this thing. The white version I've been testing is especially bland, and does nothing to hide the sensors that make tricks like Moto Display possible. Thankfully, you can do something to potentially remedy this. The Turbo 2 is the first Verizon Droid you can run through Motorola's MotoMaker customizer, with three different material choices for the back and a host of color options for the metal frame and oblong accent on the rear.
In fairness, the backside isn't bad; my test unit has a neat soft-touch plastic back with a tessellating triangle pattern and a sturdy silver metal rim around the edges. Still, some things remain annoying no matter the finish you choose. Hefty bezels encircle the 5.4-inch Quad HD screen, making the Turbo 2 feel wider than it actually is. Also, while the Turbo 2 made its official debut after Verizon's big rebranding, it still has the discontinued Verizon Wireless logo on it. Fortunately, it's only on the external lens -- Motorola's name for the thick, plastic screen protector that'll catch all those pesky scratches -- so you if you really wanted to you could peel it off

Of course, you might disagree with me about all of this. Great! We can probably still agree that the Droid reputation hinges more on pure power than style and fortunately, the Turbo 2 has that in spades. A high-end octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 thrums away inside, paired with 3GB of LPDDR4 RAM and an Adreno 430 GPU. Since Motorola is a big fan of its contextual computing tricks (as am I), there are also two additional co-processors to help the phone monitor motion and listen for your voice commands. The combination makes for some seriously snappy (not to mention thoughtful) performance, but I'll dig into that more later.
The Turbo 2 was also blessed with extra power in the form of a hefty, if sealed, 3,760mAh battery. Sure, last year's Droid Turbo had an even bigger cell, but Motorola claims you'll be able to squeeze about two full days of usage out of this year's model. Throw in a microSD card slot to supplement the 32GB or 64GB of internal storage -- expandable up to 2TB, whenever those cards show up -- and you've got a device that ticks almost every box that power users care about. If anything, I wish Motorola had bothered to make the new Turbo waterproof just for good measure, especially considering how sturdy the phone is otherwise.

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