** A note before you read this review. I will not be comparing this phone to the Apple iPhone. I am a Verizon customer, I will NEVER be a AT&T customer again so I see no need to compare the two. Plus the fact that almost every review you read will be doing that I will provide you with something different. A review for people like me who are already on Verizon and want a lifestyle phone worthy of the name.
People have inquired about what I think of my new phone so I decided to give a full review. Firstly let me say that I researched this and the HTC Droid Eris extensively before making my choice. I spent most of the last two months reading the rumor sites (Did you know there are entire sites dedicated to what new phones are coming out? Crazy..) When I first saw the phone that would become the Droid I was not impressed. One it had a keyboard. It makes no sense to me to have a touch phone with a keyboard. Two the first images had a chrome bezel and red control buttons. It looked more like something from 2000 not 2010. I kept my fingers crossed that Verizon would get the HTC Eris which is a re-brand of the HTC Hero on Sprint and the MyTouch on T-Mobile. But then I started to look into the engine that runs both the Droid and the Eris and I started to lean toward the Droid. Plus the fact that the Eris runs Android 1.6 and the Droid runs Android 2.0 clinched it.
Lets start with what Android is. Android for those not in the know is a phone operating system. All phones (like all computers) have a underlying program that lets them do what they do. And almost all cell phone companies have their own versions. Android is an OS (Operating system) that was designed and continually upgraded by Google. It is also free to any cell phone carrier that desires to run it. This is huge when you think that Microsoft charges $10-$15 per phone to use their OS. The first phone to run the Android OS was the T-Mobile G-Phone.
This phone featured a touch screen and a keyboard plus a tricked out little trackball. But pretty and sexy it aint. Reviewers stated it was sluggish and that the phone did not do everything someone expected. Cut to this year and the phones are getting sexy, the speed is getting better and the Android OS is now running on more than ten phones. I predict that by next year the Android OS will be running on multiple phones on every carrier. (Verizon will have three Android phone by the end of 2009 and more coming after that)
You now have the history, now on to the Droid. I was at the Verizon store at 6:30 am and was the first one there. By the time the store opened at 8:00 am there were four of us. I thought to myself "Well, this is a bust..." but by the time I had my Droid paid for and all the BS one has to do to get that done the store was full with people waiting to get a representatives attention. "OK, maybe I did make a good choice" I also got the two docks for the home and car and will get to those later.
Out of the box the Droid is impressive. It feels solid, the back side is coated in a mat-black rubber and the front is black metal and glass. When you slide open the phone you hear a nice "CLICK" there is a power on and off button on top, volume and camera button on the side and a mini-USB slot on the other. Over all I give all the outer control buttons a "B" they work, but the power button is hard to find in the dark and the volume button feels like it's loose. (I check the other phone on display and it was the same.) In your pocket the phone is not too bulky and easy to find. It does not bulk out since it is VERY slim. Against your ear the edges of the phone do not feel like something you would want to talk on for hours and I found that my earing clicks against the screen while I was walking and talking. But I would expect that from any touch phone.
As a phone the Droid preforms well, I am hard of hearing and have had phones that are too quite. The Droid is nice and load and the call quality is the best of any phone I have ever used plus being on the Verizon network I expect to have service almost everywhere.
The Android OS. Wow! I was a Palm Treo owner for some time and loved all the ways I could customize it to suit my needs. I think its a mistake to call phones like the Droid and the iPhone a "smartphone" a better name would be a "Life style" phone. That is not to say that it's not a good business phone, it handles MS Email Exchange and has a brilliant contact organization system but when you load up a app that lets you find pubs that serve your fave beers and look at their menu then I think you have passed what we used to call a "smartphone". The OS is really nice! and there are screens after screens. Drag your finger from the top of the phone down and you have all the notifications - Email's received, Calls missed, GChat convos etc. Slide your finger from the bottom to the top you have all your programs (Also called apps) that are installed. Drag your finger right or left and you have two additional home screens to put app short cuts and widgets. It has taken me all weekend to get my phone where I am happy with the layout and it was a lot of fun to figure out where to put things. And the apps available are great! Just this weekend in free apps I added -
Where - An app that will search local gas, movies, food etc from my current position and even give me prices and reviews.
A bar code reader - I launch this and point the camera at any bar code and it will tell me the price plus give me product reviews.
Weather - Local weather and 7 day forecast.
Games - Solitaire, Breakout, etc
Pandora - I can listen to internet radio right on my phone.
The docks are a nice accessories - The car dock turns your Droid into a navigation GPS and the new Google turn by turn nav system works like a dream!
The bedside dock turns your phone into a alarm clock, multimedia viewer and weather station and if you live in Chicago like me then you know how handy that is when you wake up on a winter morning.
Both run $30 each and I highly suggest you buy them.
The phone has 16 gigs of storage out of the box and can be expanded to 32 gigs (If you can find a Micro SD card that size. I could not.) The phone is fast and sometimes too fast. Many times I hit a link or a button by accident and had to go back. The phone has touch QWERTY keyboards that you can set to give you a bit of a vibrate to let you know you hit them (out of the box this function is set to "off" I turned mine on and enjoy that setting) the actual keyboard is functional. I find that I do not use it much so far.
The camera is listed as a 5 megapixel but I have found in practice that the phone is almost the same as the 1.5 megapixel that my LG EnV had. The video camera function on the other hand is outstanding! I do not plan on selling my 3 CCD chip HD 120 gig camera anytime soon but the video is crisp and sound is nice. Plus you can upload to YouTube right from the phone. NICE!
This brings me to the best part of this phone... The screen is a thing of joy to look at. I can see myself watching a movie or two on a plane once I figure out how to encode a DVD to it. (I found a few websites and looks like a full move encoded for the Droid will take about 300 megs. So you could load three full length movies and only take up a gig of your allotted 16. Not bad.
The battery life is impressive also. Not in the league of my Treo (Which would last a week on a charge no matter how much you used it) but I have been riding this phone like a rented pack mule this weekend and the battery lasts me an entire day.
Overall I am completely pleased with my Droid and consider it the most amazing phone I have ever owned. I can't help but think about the last phone that Motorola had the was a huge hit. The Razr. I remember when that phone came out and people where paying $200 to get one. Within a year it was the free phone on almost any wireless company. If that happens with this phone then the Android operating system will steam roll almost all the competition! Think about it, if all they have to do is make the phone and not pay for the OS and Verizon and other companies get to sell data plans right and left then this phone could be a monster!
Only time will tell, but I think the Motorola Droid is a game changer...
