Motorola Droid 4 (Verizon Wireless)

Cast off your BlackBerry for good. If you've been waiting for a no-compromises, keyboarded super-phone, the Droid 4 ($199 with two-year contract) is for you. It blows away its competing smartphones, most notably with its excellent QWERTY keyboard. It's not only our Editors' Choice for keyboarded phones on Verizon, it's the best keyboard we've seen on any phone, on any carrier.

Physical Design, Call Quality and Internet
Like most Android phones these days, the Motorola Droid 4 is a pretty large slab at 5 by 2.7 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and a hefty 6.3 ounces, thickened by a large battery and that absolutely delightful slide-out keyboard. Carrying a Droid 4 is going to weigh down your pocket, no question about it, but it's worth it.

The display is a 4-inch, 960-by-540 LCD panel. Its colors are less saturated than you'll see on the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx's ($299.99, 4.5 stars) Super Amoled Advanced screen, but the Droid 4 is bright and sharp enough for indoor or outdoor use.

And oh, that keyboard! The five-row rubber keypad is the best I've ever encountered on a phone of this kind. The keys are well-separated, wonderfully tactile, and gloriously backlit. Yes, my fingers hit the top of the keypad sometimes when typing numbers, but I didn't find the top row of buttons difficult to type on. Like most sliders (and unlike most BlackBerries) this is definitely a two-handed keyboard. But if you're okay with the size, this is the best one you'll get.?The phone's back cover peels off to reveal the MicroSD and SIM card slots, as well as a non-removable battery.

The Droid 4 is an excellent voice phone that connects to Verizon's CDMA Rev A and LTE networks, with no global roaming. Reception was strong, and call quality was very good in my tests. The earpiece and speakerphone can both get very loud without distortion, and there's a ton of sidetone (the reflection of your own voice in your ear to stop you from yelling). Transmissions through the mic let through a bit of background noise, but not enough to cause any real trouble.

The phone paired easily with our Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset?($129, 4.5 stars), allowing for accurate voice dialing and clear music and video sound playback. You get Bluetooth 4.0, allowing the potential for various smart watches and fitness devices to talk to the phone.

Battery life was excellent. I got an awesome 11 hours, 47 minutes of 3G talk time on the 1,785 mAh battery. That should put the Droid 4 significantly above average for 4G Web surfing as well. And Motorola's Smart Actions software, which does things like optionally turn data off while you're sleeping, helps even more.?Speaking of 4G, the Droid 4 got solid speeds of around 10Mbps down on Verizon's 4G LTE network, and the phone works as both a tethered modem and a Wi-Fi hotspot.?

With the appropriate accessory dock, the Droid 4 can turn into a laptop or desktop PC, too. When plugged into the a dock, Motorola's Webtop mode reboots the phone into a desktop verison of Linux running Firefox 8.0 with Flash, and also Android in a window. I tried the Droid 4 with Motorola's $49.99 HD Dock and $249.99 Lapdock 100. The screen image looked a bit soft on the Lapdock 100, but I was able to do my desktop computing on the bigger laptop keyboard.

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