Motorola Droid Turbo 2 review:

The Motorola Droid Turbo 2 has a tough screen that won't crack. Plus, it has top-tier performance, solid battery life and the ability to design your own phone at Motorola's website. The Turbo 2's camera lags behind the best you can buy, and the shatterproof screen comes with some trade-offs.

In the US, its exclusive to Verizon. The Verizon-exclusive Droid Turbo 2 delivers on its promise of an unbreakable screen -- and it's a great all-around Android phone, too. The Droid Turbo 2 is the phone to buy if you're tired of broken glass. It's got a screen that doesn't crack when you drop it.
Whether you drop it on an edge, a corner, or face-first into the pavement. You can step on it. Run over it with a vehicle. It's so durable that Motorola guarantees the screen won't break for 4 whole years -- a longer warranty than the entire rest of the phone. Note, however, that neither the phone nor the screen are indestructible: you can definitely puncture the screen on purpose, particularly if you use tools. And if you "accidentally" throw the phone off a six-story building, you'll probably end up with an unbroken screen surrounded by a wreck of a phone. But that unbreakable screen isn't just a gimmick -- the rest of the Droid Turbo 2 is excellent through and through.

   

As you'd expect from a flagship Motorola Droid -- the name of a sub-brand sold exclusively with Verizon Wireless in the US -- it's absolutely packed with specs, including a brilliant 5.4-inch quad-HD AMOLED display, a top-shelf Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor, and 3GB of RAM.

It's also got a big 3,760mAh battery with fast charging and two different forms of wireless charging, making it extremely convenient to refill in the middle of your day. It's even got a microSD slot built into the SIM card tray, so you can expand its built-in 32GB or 64GB of storage in a snap.

Droid Turbo 2 at Motorola's own Moto Maker website with a whole variety of finishes, from gun metal gray with a ballistic nylon rear cover to a white handset with a leather back. Droid Turbo 2 isn't perfect is big, and pricey ($624, or $26 a month), and limited to Verizon Wireless in the United States.

Price & Availability

The Motorola Droid Turbo 2 is a Verizon Wireless exclusive in the United States--though a practically identical phone, the Moto X Force, will ship globally later this year. In the US, you can buy the phone either direct from Verizon or through Motorola's Moto Maker website.

Either way, you're looking at an upfront payment of $624 (or $26 a month for 24 months) for the basic version with 32GB of storage, or $720 (or $30 a month for 24 months) if you want 64GB of storage instead. If you design your phone at Moto Maker, you optionally add a pebble leather back for an extra $24.

The 64GB version also comes with a "design refresh," which lets you trade in your phone for a new design of your choice within two years of purchase. In the UK, the Moto X Force will ship this November for £499. We don't have pricing or availability for Australia yet.

Shatterproof screen

• 5.4-inch, 2,560x1,440-pixel resolution plastic AMOLED display (540ppi)
• Integrated screen protector to absorb scratches
• Four-year warranty against cracking and shattering

A screen that doesn't crack when you drop it. It seems too good to be true. But the Droid Turbo 2's shatterproof screen really is shatterproof. That doesn't mean the Droid Turbo 2 is completely indestructible, though. Even though the screen stood up to a nasty beating, the rest of the phone can still take damage. Repeated drops onto rough stones left all sorts of dents and dings.

The 5.4-inch quad-HD AMOLED screen is crisp and colorful, and even if it's not the equal of the gorgeous panels you'd find on a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, it does the job beautifully. Both in terms of size and optical quality, it's more than enough screen for me. For many, the screen protector won't be a huge deal, particularly if they need the durability the Droid Turbo 2's screen offers.

Design

• 5.90 by 3.07 by 0.36 inches (150 by 78 by 9.2 mm)
• 6.0 ounces (169 grams)
• Customizable design

The Droid Turbo 2 is an alternate reality version of the Moto X. It's a streamlined, turbocharged, rugged Moto X designed around the new shatterproof screen. At first, the Turbo 2 and Pure look much the same -- the same as any of Motorola's recent handsets, to be honest. Both have a solid metal ring around the edge of the phone, a Micro-USB port at the bottom, a headphone jack up top, and a nice rigid metal power button and volume rocker on the right edge of the handset. But where the Pure's tall, smooth, rounded frame could feel a little unwieldy, the Turbo 2's distinctive beveled edges and flatter back fit far easier into my hands.

They look sleeker, too, if you ask me, and I like the way the phone's camera module and fingerprint divots are flush with the phone's back. Those components tended to jut up awkwardly in previous Motorola handsets. The new shatterproof screen is notably smaller than the one in the Moto X Pure, and it makes the Turbo's bezels look pretty big.

I also don't like the way dirt can easily get trapped in the cracks of the rubber rear panels. Speaking of trade-offs Motorola made to fit that shatterproof display, here's one more: unlike other top-tier Motorola phones, the Droid Turbo 2 has a single front-facing speaker instead of twin stereo speakers.

Software and apps

• Android 5.1.1 Lollipop
• Hands-free voice control
• Moto Actions gesture controls
• Moto Display

Unlike the new Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X, the Motorola Droid Turbo 2 doesn't come with the latest Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system, and we don't know when that will change. While Motorola tells us it's working as fast as possible, history has shown that Verizon phones can take a long time to get updates.

The Droid Turbo 2 will automatically turn on the camera if you give it a vigorous twist. You can shake the phone twice to turn on the flashlight, or wave your hand above the display to check the time and your incoming notifications. Record a set phrase like "OK, Droid Turbo" and you can issue voice commands. And all of these things work even if the phone's asleep.

New for 2015 is "Discreet Moto Voice," which is pretty handy as well: Instead of speaking commands out loud, and having the phone reply out loud, you can simply raise the phone to your ear and talk at a normal volume. It felt weird the first few times I tried it...but perhaps a little less weird than talking to an inanimate object in public.

While the Droid Turbo 2's camera doesn't have optical image stabilization -- probably one of the reasons low-light images suffer to begin with -- it does have digital stabilization when you're recording video, even at 4K resolution. That's a definite plus, as it means you'll be able to get much more detail from that 4K video while moving than you might with other phones.

Hardware performance

• 2.0GHz eight-core Snapdragon 810 processor
• 32 or 64GB storage, expandable to 2TB via microSD slot
• 3,760mAh embedded battery
• Two forms of wireless charging: Qi and PMA
• Wired fast charging: 25 percent in 15 minutes

I feel like I shouldn't need to tell you that the Droid Turbo 2 is a blazing-fast phone. It's right there in the name. But truly, it's one of the fastest phones I've used. The 2.0GHz Snapdragon 810 chip and 3GB of RAM just scream through tasks, whether I'm simply swiping through the operating system, loading up websites or playing intensive games like Riptide GP2 with the settings cranked up.

There's nothing particularly special about that performance, mind you. Plenty of phones have the same Snapdragon 810 chip, and they're similarly fast. Ditto the Apple chips you'll find in the new iPhones(they're maybe a smidge faster) and the Exynos chips you'll find in the latest Samsung Galaxies.