Android’s Quick Settings has been around long before Apple came up with a similar tray of settings and different manufacturers like to tweak or in the case of the Droid Turbo, not tweak this tray. The Motorola Droid Turbo on the Verizon Wireless network is one of the hottest phones of 2014. The phone has a mega battery, large display, front-facing speaker, and the works. I think you get the picture, but if not head over to your near VZW store and pick one up.
First of all, just so everyone knows how to access the quick settings, from the home screen drag two fingers from the top of the screen down about half way and let go or use one finger and then tap the grid-looking icon in the top right corner. Tweet this
For those who know me, I’m kind of a fanboy for HTC so when I review phones from other OEM’s I go by what I know and how it compares to the phone that’s in my hands. When it comes to the quick settings, I really like what HTC has done for users and what I found with the Motorola Droid Turbo was a little disappointing, but to be fair we’ll just call it a little on the simple side. When I first pulled down the quick settings menu I wondered how I could add more options to the tray, because all you get are 9, non-changeable settings. I researched this, because I thought, “No, this is Motorola and they gotta at least make this part better. Right?” Nope. A suggestion I read online was to add a custom ROM into the mix if you wanted to have some better options, but since this is a review unit that’s not on my To-Do list.
In order, the quick settings are:
- OWNER
- BRIGHTNESS
- SETTINGS
- WI-FI
- DATA USAGE
- BATTERY
- AIRPLANE MODE
- BLUETOOTH
- LOCATION
The way you interact with these quick settings is a little different than the way HTC handled it. When you tap on a “quick setting” it takes you to the settings page for the particular item so a quick action does not actually take place yet. Well it’s interesting, because five of the options perform the action you expect right away; OWNER takes you to the linked contact, BRIGHTNESS gives you a bar to adjust, SETTINGS takes you the main settings page, BATTERY gives you a preview of your consumption (but there’s not an actual setting to adjust), and AIRPLANE MODE toggles your radios. As for the remaining four settings you have to tap and hold to toggle the option on and off rather than jump to all the settings for that specific item.
HTC allows the user to list 12 quick settings and those settings can be rearranged or even replaced by another 10 more settings standing by. Technically there’s 13 options, because there’s a gear icon above this menu that will take you to the main Settings page. All of HTC’s quick settings are a tap for action plus there’s three dots next to the name of the setting that will launch its settings page or you can press and hold the quick launch until the page comes up.
Motorola has a really great phone, but my first impression of the quick settings left me hungry for more. I’m sure the Motorola Droid Turbo is on the top of the list to receive the Android 5.0, Lollipop update and when it does I bet we’ll see more options here, fingers crossed.