Motorola Droid Turbo hands-on: First look

Motorola Droid Turbo camera samples

Motorola developed a camera especially for the Droid Turbo. It may not be optically stabilized like the Nexus 6 camera but it goes after Sony's Xperia Z family with a 21MP sensor. It sits behind a wide f/2.0 aperture and is accompanied by a dual-LED flash.

The camera sensor shoots 4(cat) photos (5,248x3,936) but you can switch to 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio at 15.5MP (5,248x2,952).

We snapped three quick samples with the camera but it's way too early to talk image quality.

Motorola Droid Turbo camera samples

For video capture the Motorola Droid Turbo manages 2160p at 24fps. We don't know why Moto didn't go for 30fps (the Snapdragon 805 can certainly handle it) and there's no high-fps mode at 1080p, just the usual 1080p@30fps.

Here is a 1080p video sample captured with Motorola Droid Turbo.

Following next is a UHD video captured by the device. See it below.

The device captured slow-motion videos in 720p only. It stretches 10 seconds of video capture in about 40 seconds of footage. Here is a sample.

Performance

Built upon a Snapdragon 805 chipset with a quad-core 2.7GHz Krait 450, 3GB of RAM and the Adreno 420 graphics processing unit the Motorola Droid Turbo should be a true benchmarks champ. We've found that a mostly pure Android helps a lot too.

And indeed it is - the Droid Turbo utilizes its hardware very well and managed to top immediate competitors in GeekBench 3. The Samsung Galaxy Note 4, for example, has the same chipset and screen resolution, OS version too. The Motorola also managed to outdo the 64-bit Apple iPhone 6.

GeekBench 3

Higher is better

• Motorola Droid Turbo
  3080
• Samsung Galaxy S5 (S801)
  3011
• Motorola Moto X (2014)
  2984
• Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  2925
• Apple iPhone 6
  2924
• LG G3 (2GB/16GB)
  2563
• HTC One (M8)
  2367

The Droid Turbo easily topped our AnTuTu 5 comparison as well. The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 stays a close second to Motorola's latest flagship. Snapdragon 801 smartphones are left in the dust of the newer chip's performance.

AnTuTu 5

Higher is better

• Motorola Droid Turbo
  47067
• Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  46824
• HTC One (M8)
  44020
• Motorola Moto X (2014)
  43676
• Samsung Galaxy S5 (S801)
  43164
• LG G3 (2GB/16GB)
  39905

Basemark X and Basemark OS II scores by Motorola Droid Turbo came out impressive as well. See them below.

Basemark OS II

Higher is better

• Motorola Droid Turbo
  1345
• Apple iPhone 6
  1252
• Apple iPhone 6 Plus
  1222
• Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  1181
• Motorola Moto X (2014)
  1176

Basemark X

Higher is better

• Motorola Droid Turbo
  18971
• Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  18684
• Apple iPhone 6 Plus
  18297
• Apple iPhone 6
  17054
• Motorola Moto X (2014)
  11855

As expected, the device’s Adreno 420 GPU does a good job in handling the multitude of pixels. The newcomer performed in line with the similarly equipped Samsung Galaxy Note 4.

GFX 2.7 T-Rex (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 6 Plus
  44.6
• Apple iPhone 6
  42.6
• Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  41.7
• Motorola Droid Turbo
  40.9
• Motorola Moto X (2014)
  26.6

GFX 2.7 T-Rex (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 6
  51
• Motorola Moto X (2014)
  28.3
• Motorola Droid Turbo
  26.6
• Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  26.4

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 6 Plus
  18.6
• Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  18.5
• Motorola Droid Turbo
  18
• Apple iPhone 6
  17.7
• Motorola Moto X (2014)
  11.4

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 6
  29.2
• Motorola Moto X (2014)
  11.9
• Motorola Droid Turbo
  11.4
• Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  11.2

Thanks to Samsung's typical optimizations to the web browser it managed to grab a win from the Droid Turbo, which uses Google's mobile Chrome browser that typically doesn't benchmark as well.

Kraken 1.1

Lower is better

• Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  5351
• Motorola Droid Turbo
  5763
• Samsung Galaxy S5 (S801)
  6043
• Motorola Moto X (2014)
  6209
• LG G3 (2GB/16GB)
  6987
• HTC One (M8)
  10296