Hands-on with the Motorola Bionic playing Dungeon Defenders at CES 2011

At CES 2011 there were a ton of new Android goodies to play around with. One of the more impressive phones was the Motorola Bionic which is a part of a few new awesome Motorola devices slated for release soon. While we were going to do a traditional type of hands-on, our device happen to have Dungeon Defenders installed on it.

So we had to play it for a minute. While it isn't the longest hands on we've done, due to the large crowd swarming the Motorola booth that day, we did get a good grasp on the performance you can expect to have when playing an Unreal Engine 3 developed game on the Bionic. First a run down of the Bionic specs.

Specs:

• nVidia Tegra 2 dual-core 1GHz processor
• 4.3" qHD screen running at 540x960 resolution
• 512MB DDR2 RAM / 2GB ROM
• 4G LTE on Verizon
• Android 2.2
• 8MP rear camera with dual LED flash / Front 0.3MP camera
• All the usual connections: microUSB/HDMI/3.5mm jack

Dungeon Defenders: First Wave is Android's first game developed using the Unreal Engine 3 thanks to Trendy Entertainment's hard work. While the game can run on non-Tegra devices, it was developed with the use of a Tegra 2 chip in mind. Loading time was actually pretty quick on the Motorola Bionic after the initial start of the game. All the graphical settings were maxed as well but didn't seem to phase the Bionic. In fact, jumping through the menus and loading screens after the initial game launch was incredibly fast. It seemed faster than even on the Galaxy Tablet.

The actual gameplay was great with smooth rendering of the 3D graphics, all on max settings, and there was absolutely no gittering or lag when running around and smacking an enemy with my staff (I like the wizard). Unfortunately we couldn't get too deep into the game due to the line-up of people waiting and the Motorola reps giving us funny looks. That could be due to getting into the Convention Center 2 hours early before anything was open and getting ushered out of their booth, twice.

Either way, from what we experienced with the Bionic in the short time we had to fondle it, it's a slick device that feels good holding in your hand while playing games and offers up some amazing performance as well. Everything looked crisp and ran like a charm. If you're in the market for a new Android device, this is definitely one to consider, especially if you like playing heavy graphical games.