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The Motorola Droid

Motorola Droid

I just recently picked up the new Motorola Droid for the Verizon network. I'd been looking forward to its release ever since it was announced a number of months ago. I was so excited because I wasn't able to get in on the G1 action back when that came out, due it being on the T-Mobile network and me having a binding contract with Verizon for nearly another year. I suppose the developer's version would've been a possibility, but it was priced at roughly $500 at the time, so that was pretty much a no-go. But the Droid is on Verizon, which is perfect for me, especially since they have excellent coverage where I live (Chicago), and because I get a discount for upgrading my phone and plan since my contract had expired. The Droid is also far more polished than the G1, which had a rather ugly design, quite honestly.

I've never owned a smart-phone before. Going back a ways, I had a Razr (just like everybody else) and then moved to Verizon and got the LG enV, which was a massive step up from the Razr. The enV has a physical keyboard, a larger inner screen, amongst many other improved features. It is a relatively nice phone, in its own right, but it has it's issues. My chief complaints had to do with its limitations, especially when you consider that Verizon toted the enV as its first "smart phone." The platform was just too closed and restrictive to really be worthy of the smart phone title, in my opinion. The browser was substandard, email and instant messaging were lacking as well. When compared with iPhone at the time, it really paled in comparison. Despite that, it is a nice dumb phone, if you'll please pardon the word play.

LG enV

Now going from those experiences to the Droid has been a real eye-opener. I had played with friend's iPhones and G1's, but that was the extent of my smart phone experience.

Time for a quick and dirty review of the Droid.

First off, the screen is very nice. Quite bright and smooth, and it's very accurate as far as touch goes. It also appears to be scratch-resistant, but I would still recommend getting some sort of screen protector to ward off finger print and other smudges.

I've heard that a sizable portion of customers don't like the physical keyboard, mainly due to complaints regarding how difficult it is to differentiate keys by touch alone. Personally, I find the keyboard to be quite easy to use. Of course, I'm much more used to physical keyboards than others might be, coming from the enV, so your mileage may vary. It took me quite a while to become acclimated to the virtual keyboard, but now I use it roughly half the time. The key-proximity typo correction and auto-completion are very useful, which is why I've ended up using it so much after generally not liking virtual keyboards.

The next thing that I noticed was the fluidity and intuitive nature of the interface. Everything was designed and placed in a very logical manner. Things are where you'd expect them to be, essentially. It's sad that I've come to expect the opposite, but that's a story for another day.

The battery last plenty long for my needs. It easily lasts a day under moderately heavy usage. If I really wanted to, I could most likely get away with charging it every two days, possibly more. As it is, though, I plug it in every night and I'm good to go. Even though I've only had it for a month, and this observation may not count for much yet, the battery still holds its charge as well as it did when I first took it out of the box.

Obviously, a major component to the Droid (to every Android-based mobile device, really) is the app market. I must say, every time I've looked for an app to fulfill some purpose or requirement, I've generally found a high-quality solution, most of which have been free. While the Android market "only" has tens of thousands of apps, while the iPhone has something in the range of a hundred thousand, I'm not really sure how much of a factor that is. From what I hear from friend's that own the iPhone, most of the apps are either clones, garbage, or some combination of both.

Some people might be interested to know that Motorola and Verizon are teaming up to release Android v2.1 to the Droid quite soon, which was developed specifically for the Google Nexus One. This means that the Droid will now have all the awesome new features that the Nexus One has!