I don’t like typing a full review, but after using my new Droid for the past 2 weeks I can honestly say, THIS THING IS AWESOME. It’s an amazing device. I will just give you some brief highlights and some low lights for those of you still trying to stay away.
One of my favorite things about the Droid is that it’s solid. It has an industrial high tech feel. It doesn’t feel like a device that is intended for your teenage sister or your grandmother. It feels rock solid. The slider is not spring loaded, but that’s not a problem. It clicks very nicely when you open it, and it just overall feels like the densely packed piece of high tech that it is.
The screen on the droid is amazing. The colors and brightness are fantastic. The only drawback to having a resolution higher than most people’s first computer monitor is that it makes some of the older touch screen apps a bit hard to handle. All of that said, I’ll take dense screen any day of the week.
The Droid is snappy. It behaves as well if not better than any iPhone and miles ahead of every WinMo device. It’s not snapdragon snappy, but just as well, the graphics are smooth and it handles nearly everything you can throw at it.
The integration is very tight. Coming from a windows mobile device, the first thing you will notice is the seemless integration of the phone/data radio as well as the GPS. There is no turning it off/on or waiting for things to dial in so you can surf the web. It is damn near instant on, and fast enough to make ATT’s faster and less reliable network an undesirable purgatory.
This brings me to the Apps. There are some benefits and draw backs to the Droids apps. First, the benefits. The app install process tells you what the application can access, to prevent you from installing an application that could unknowingly cost you money or worse, send your data to unwanted and unknown third parties. Second, because android is (mostly) open, it allows every user to write software for their phone and distribute it to other people without the need to pay $99. Also, because you can get apps on your phone from non-store places without ‘jailbreaking’ there are plenty of ‘other sources’ for applications that don’t have to be approved by Google.
There are two main drawbacks to the App enviornment on Android and the Droid. The first is the number. This is a time based thing, and it seems that Android is just starting to come into it’s own and will only improve with time, but right now it severely lacks behind Apple’s app store. Current estimates have the Android marketplace at about 15k apps. iPhone is at over 100k. It’s not as big of deal as you think because of the volume of ‘Tila Tequila’s Tweets’-type Apps that aren’t in Android but major players are missing like Slingbox and several others.
The other is an easy fix from Google themselves and that is the difficulty in buying apps from the App store. They haven’t set up the same sleek system of buying things from their store. You can’t go to any convinience store and buy an Android gift card like you can for iTunes. Additionally you can’t setup a credit card on file ahead of time and keep an account. You must enter your info every time. Yes it’s more secure, but isn’t the whole point of an app store is to streamline the process?! Given time both of these problems should go away.
The other drawbacks are that the droid doesn’t have the best battery life. It’s not the thing you can use to play games on all day long (but you can’t do that with the iPod). It’s not amazing, but it’s not poor.
The physical keyboard is poor. No matter the decision, someone was going to bitch, but the implimentation of the physical keyboard is poor as it is. You don’t really need it given the good soft keyboard.
All in all, it’s an amazing device.