Following the announcement of the Droid, the new Motorola phone on the Verizon network, I decided to purchase one. I’ve had it a couple days and wanted to share my experience. First off, I will not be reviewing it against the iPhone. I’m a Verizon customer and don’t feel any reason for that to change. I’ll be looking at how it rates against what I had previously, the BlackBerry Curve.
Physical/Features:
The first thing that grabs your attention about this phone is the touchscreen. It’s huge and displays highly detailed graphics. Colors are crisp, text is easy to read. It’s scratch resistant glass, so barring keys or other metal objects, I don’t see it getting scratched too easily. Unfortunately, the next thing that grabs your attention is how hefty the phone is. At 169 grams, it’s a good deal heavier than the Curve (114 g). It’s very noticeable at first, but I’ve become somewhat accustomed to it already. As far as build quality goes, it feels much more solid than the Curve. It’s this hefty metal brick, you could probably do some serious damage in a fight by bashing someone with it. The phone would probably come away from it no worse for wear, as well.
It’s a slider, with a horizontal keyboard tucked underneath and unlike the Curve’s small vertical keyboard, the keys are indeed flat. I haven’t done much typing with it yet, but the physical keyboard is horribly uncomfortable. This is mostly due to having to hold my right hand at an awkward angle to clear its “chin” and directional buttons. I end up using the on screen keyboard, which is actually great.
Battery life seems to be about on par with the Curve. I get through a whole day with light-moderate usage and charge it every night.
The speaker is much louder than the Curve. Speakerphone is crisp and understandable. You could actually listen to music on it without external speakers. I’m quite impressed with it. Call quality speaking and listening was good as well, on par with the Curve.
Camera was on par with the Curve. I’m not impressed by either. They seem to be OK for just general phone cameras.
WiFi… Well, I set it up and it works. It seems to use more battery than standard wireless. Verizon’s network is quick enough that I don’t think I’ll be using this except in the rare case that I don’t have wireless reception.
File management is about the same as the BlackBerry. You basically have access to the SD card. Drag files in to have them in your phone. Nothing fancy.
Interface/Operating System:
Having never used an Android phone before, I was off and running within minutes. Granted, the Verizon rep at the store did do the initial setup for me, having me enter my Google account details. I’m not sure how it works without a Google account. That’s something you might want to keep in mind. I added two other email accounts; my standard IMAP account worked without a problem, but my OWA account doesn’t seem to be working.
The first thing I played with was the Navigation. GPS was actually useful and seems to be unlocked, unlike the Curve, which won’t allow GPS access to anything except BlackBerry Maps. The nice navigation lady told me where to turn as expected, but her voice was a bit hard to understand, possibly because it’s a text to speech virtual voice. Might need a bit of work there.
The desktop interface itself was incredibly nice to use after being stuck with a horribly shoddy Curve trackball. You just swipe your finger around it and poke it when you want to click. Easy and responsive. On top, that thing there is a status bar. At first I wondered why there were so many icons up there, but then I realized you could pull it down the screen like a drawer. This holds all your notifications about emails and missed calls and such. They don’t interrupt you, and you don’t have to exit your currently running application to look at them either. There’s two context menus on most screens, it seems. You have the application context menu, which will give you settings and such; it’s set up to be one of the ever-present bottom buttons. A lot of other settings are hidden behind a long tap on items on the screen. Just press down and hold. It’s not really clear to me just yet why some things are in the long press menu and some are in the application button menu. Not as well organized as the Curve at least, but definitely usable. There’s no where near as many options as on the Curve, which is nice and horrifying at the same time. You don’t have the same granulated control over things, but things are also a whole lot simpler. Application switching is about the same as the Curve. I’m not quite sure if these programs are exiting, but mostly you just hit the “home” button to freeze what you’re doing in one app and open another. Hit it again and go back, and it should pick up where you left off. I don’t have the satisfaction of hitting “exit” in most apps, putting into question the battery life; but that seems to be a non-issue.
Browsing. Wow! Just… amazing. Going from the Curve browser to the Droid’s is like trading in your bicycle for a BMW. It renders the full page, double tap to zoom in, drag around to move. Javascript and CSS work! It’s way faster. I am very impressed.
Ringtones and notifications seem about as customizable as BlackBerry, except the lack of profiles. As I went to bed last night, I was wondering if there was a setting similar to “Phone Only” on the Curve. I’d like to silence emails and SMS at night, but if I get a call, I want to hear it. It seemed I can only put the phone in Ring, Vibrate, or Silent. I’ll have to look into this some more.
I haven’t tried playing mp3s on it yet, but I can’t assume it’s any worse than the Curve’s atrocious music player.
Applications:
Now, I think this is where the Curve had an advantage. There seems to be many more apps available for BlackBerry. I’m not just talking about the ones you can get in their app store. You could go online and download amazing apps, like SocialScope and BeeJive IM. There just doesn’t seem to be the same availability of applications on the Android platform. Android is still a newcomer though and as it just opened up to Verizon’s network, it should be getting an influx of new users, and therefore apps, if you’re willing to wait for them.
Also, things like Facebook don’t seem as tightly integrated into the OS. When I get a new message on Facebook, I don’t get a notification, just the email that they send to me. I haven’t looked to see if there was ways to easily post a picture from the picture browsing app yet, and that sort of thing.
Downloading and installing apps is just as easy, click them, download, and hit install. The market in Android is actually useful too, unlike on the Curve. I was able to search around and find plenty of applications to install. Maybe too many, even.
Overall:
Well, the Droid definitely feels like a more consumer oriented phone, a bit more fun than a Curve. Overall, I’m not sure I would recommend the Droid to casual computer people, not just yet at least. Basically, if you don’t mind beta-testing software, it seems like a great start to a huge platform, and surely the best hardware Verizon has going for it. You’re probably not going to get the smooth contained BlackBerry experience, but it feels like there’s so much more opportunity. It’s honestly a bit like the wild west.
