The Verizon Motorola Droid X is still about a week away from getting official, but that isn’t going to keep us from playing around with our own Droid X and putting all its best features to the test. There are a lot of awesome features to talk about here, but for the sake of time and your sanity, we’re going to limit this talk to the X’s HDMI-out capabilities. We’ve hooked up our big-screened Droid X to our big-screen TV to show you what it looks like when you output 720p HD video and high-resolution photos to an external monitor.
For those of you not yet familiar, the Verizon Motorola Droid X is the latest Android smartphone to don the Android superphone hat. It boasts a 4.3-inch touchscreen display, a 1Ghz processor, 8-megapixel camera (with dual-LED flash), 3G data, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and a microSD card slot. There are also three separate microphones to help cancel out background noise and pickup directional audio when you record video (in 720p HD quality, of course). The Droid X also has one stand-out feature that we’re starting to see more of with these big-screen Android phones – an HDMI-out port.
The ability to stream videos to your TV is great, but there are caveats. First, you’re going to need a special microHDMI-to-HDMI cable. The HDMI port is of the “micro” variety, so don’t go thinking you can just unplug your PS3’s HDMI cable and stick it in the Droid X. Second, you’re going to have to have a TV with an HDMI input. Satisfy these two caveats and you’ll be streaming high-def pictures and movies to your dumb-box, complete with audio, in no time flat.
Here’s how it works. Plug the HDMI cable into your TV. Then you plug the microHDMI side of the cable into the X. Switch your TV to the correct input and you’re all set. You’ll notice that your TV screen will be blank until you pull up a photo or video. That’s because the X won’t output your homescreen or any other Android interfaces to your TV – it just doesn’t work like that. But, when you fire up the gallery and click on a picture or start playing a video, you’ll notice that instead of playing the content on your Droid X, the images or video will start playing on your TV.
From what we saw in our tests, video quality is pretty good. Our test TV was huge, so even 720p video looked a little pixelated, but we’re happy to say that HD videos played without any audio skips or dropped frames – even when fast forwarding. You can also stream a slideshow of photos from the X.
It can take a second or two for the Droid X to push the video stream to the TV, but that’s really just a trivial matter.
So, our conclusion for the Motorola Droid X HDMI-out feature? It works as advertised. Audio and video quality are top notch and should impress even the worst techno-snobs in your circle of friends. It sure impressed us!
The kind folks at Kanex were good enough to send us the microHDMI-to-HDMI cable used in this demo. Here’s a link to their product page, in case you feel like picking one up for yourself.
Oh, and this HDMI demo hasn’t sold you on the X, don’t forget to check out our full Verizon Motorola Droid X review here.
Verizon Motorola Droid X review