Motorola Droid: First Impressions

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

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As I mentioned here earlier this week, I’ve been thinking about switching to a different network.  Love the iPhone, but am completely unimpressed with AT&T’s network.  So I went into a Verizon store to look at the Droid over the weekend, and then bought one after work at BestBuy on Monday. 

I did the transaction at BestBuy because you get the rebate immediately, instead of having to cut off the label from the box and send it in to Verizon if you were to buy the phone at the Verizon store. 

The phone itself is quite nice.  If I hadn’t been spoiled on the iPhone, it would be the best phone I’ve played with or had.  I’ve had a couple of Blackberries, used by wife’s Motorola Q.  I haven’t used a recent Palm, so can’t compare it to that.

Verizon has a superior network.  The call quality is night and day.  The calls are crisp, the 3G network is fast, and phone calls have not been dropped in the past three two plus days.  That’s a huge improvement over AT&T, which would’ve dropped at least 2 or 3 of those calls.

As for the phone: On the upside, the physical keyboard (in addition to a virtual keyboard), while not very good, is nice to have. The keyboard is too flat, so it makes finding the right keys hard. There are many free apps, and they’re pretty good quality.  If you use Google and Gmail for your email, contacts, and calendar, the integration is seamless.  Even Facebook contacts are properly synched.  Google Voice works great, and because I’m now on a fast network, the call quality between Google Voice and the regular phone isn’t different.

I got the 16 gig version, but thankfully I can swap out the 16 gig SD card in the future for a 32 gig card if I ever want to expand the memory on the phone.  If I bought an iPhone, I’d have to buy a whole new phone to increase the capacity. 32 gig SD cards now run at about $90 to $100, so they’re not cheap, but the price will come down and I’ll do that next year. 

Unfortunately applications have to be stored in the phone’s native 500 meg memory.  That’s not a huge limitation for me, since at no time in owning the iPhone with it’s 100,000 apps did I use more than 200 meg of memory.  So I’m assuming that I won’t really run up against that limitation here.

Here’s one of the best features, which I haven’t fully explored yet.  Google includes turn-by-turn GPS navigation.  I used it last night and it was great – better than my wife’s Garmin.  It even displays the street view at the end of your trip so you can see where you should’ve arrived.  It did have trouble finding the Verizon store last night, however, but the store is brand new and may not be in Google Maps yet.

Applications run fast, and run in the background.  This is an improvement over my iPhone 3G which could take a while to launch an application, and which could not run applications in background.

The removable battery is nice, so I don’t need to send the phone into the manufacturer to replace the battery, and so that I can buy an additional battery and swap it out if the battery life doesn’t suit my needs.

On the downside, the software lacks polish.  The same button may not work the same way across applications, the applications vary in quality and so don’t all run as they should, there are only three home screens of possible apps (instead of iPhone’s 11), the phone is not seamlessly compatible with my Mac (iTunes) although there are workarounds. In addition, processes can build up in the background, requiring you to kill them.

Some people will like that last point – you can theoretically have finer grained control over the phone.  But for most people, that’s just going to be a nuisance.  Think of the iPhone as being… well a Mac, and Android being slightly closer to a Unix box in the way you have control, but also the way you need to know how to control the phone.