Well as an ongoing trend of mine lately, im reviewing shit. Cool if some of you read it if not hey whatever.
After getting rid of my iPhone I got myself a crackberry which I became fond of for quite some time, but then over time found it extremely lacking. Between the limited ammount of apps you can put on the blackberry, the what I consider to be clunky interface, and well to be honest the OS is kind of ugly. Not to take away from blackberry as its heart is in corperate america and it seems to do its job just fine there. I myself as a techy guy who likes cool expsensive toys that you can do whatever you want with found it very lacking.
So last week I picked up a Droid, call it a birthday present to myself if you will, after working a little magic with the Verizon reps I got my upgrade 2 months early even thou my line is secondary, the fact that I’ve sent my Storm back to verizon twice prior in this brillant scheme to make it look like my experiance with my blackberry was horrible, the lady I got was truely sincere and we chatted a bit, she offred to send me a Storm 2 free of charge and would not count against my upgrade or to just settle me in with the Android phone of my choice.
Off the bat the droid is a big phone, or so it seems, in reality its not much bigger than an iPhone but its hard corners and heavy metal casing make it feel big and bulky, not that this is a bad thing, the phone feels absolutely solid.
Overall though the phone feels good in the hand, it may not have the curvature of the iPhone, but none the less its not huge and fits in my average size palm nicely. I myself coming from a line of all touchscreen phones over the past year was eager to get my hands on a phone with a physical keyboard, I’ve been using my phone a lot more for e-mail and various other type of entries related to work. I am personally somewhat disappointed with the keyboard on the Droid, while I’ve gotten used to it now and can type on the physical keyboard quite well at first I found it very straining particularly on the right hand as your thumb has to stretch over the d-pad. The buttons don’t really have any initial feel to them, they feel flat although every other key does have a raise to it at first it just seemed disappointing. When pressing the keys it feels very responsive, the feedback is nice its just the initial touch as your lining up your thumbs that at first feels a little off.
By far the thing that I love most about this phone is the simplest smallest thing in the world. If any of you own an iPhone and don’t keep it wrapped up I think even you could appreciate this. On the backside of the phone, one both ends it raises up ever so slightly so that when you set the phone onto a surface such as a table/desk or wherever the backside of the phone and the camera lens is just slightly raised off the surface so that it doesn’t get scratched up. While this isnt anything groundbreaking its just one of those things that just makes you say “wow they thought of everything” I know I hated setting my iphone down onto a table as I hated body gloves so I rocked a screen protector and thats it. I always had set it down nice and gently to keep the back from getting all scuffed up.
Android itself is pretty awesome, I’ve been a fan of android since the first videos leaked out of it on the G1, I even contemplated getting T-Mobile to get my hands on the G1, but as most know T-Mobiles service is horrible, none the less their 3G is almost non existent around here and well, that would make the whole experience pretty much useless in my opinon.
While Android in its bare form is not as pretty looking as the iPhones OS, it feels nice. It’s fairly easy to get around, everything is pretty easy to find and its extremely smooth feeling. Upon my first use of the droid when it was released Android 2.0 felt kind of clunky on the droid, but with the latest update it feels much smoother.
The OS overall is quite a step up from the iPhone OS in terms of customization, the settings menu is quite exstensive and offers a task manager of sorts which allows you to view running services on the phone and force them to close to free up some room. One of the nice things thats built right in is the battery use screen, which im not sure how accurately but displays whats eating your battery the most, to no suprise with some moderate/heavy use the screen is what eats up most the life, but it shows other applications that have been running and how much battery their using.
One issue I do have with settings menu is that some things are somewhat hard to find, menus hidden in menus if you will. Up until recently I was under the impression that you could not set individual sounds for e-mail vs txt messages etc. Well randomly I found that you can set an individual sound for your e-mail accounts, was much happier after i foudn this since i have 3 e-mails on my phone.
The Market is qutie nice, theres tons of apps, nothing compared to the iPhones appstore but none the less quite impressive, so far have been able to find anything I’d need, although some I do miss on the iphone side of things that some people on the android market came seem to do quite as well.
Multi-tasking doesnt seem to be much of an issue for the droid. I’ve had quite a few things open at once, while writeing an e-mail and then recieving a phone call without issue. At times it can stutter for a moment but for the most part it works quite well, but having ~3 apps running doesnt seem to be to hard of a feat.
The phone aspect is well just as youd exspect it, a phone and it works quite well. The phone interface is nice and clean and easy to navigate in even when in a phone call, the voice quality is quite decent much better than my blackberry.
One thing I should have touched on before is the software keyboard, I actually find myself using this quite often for an on the fly response or a quick search, While it seems to be a little more finicky than the iphones, once geting used to it its very responsive, quite accurate and I havent had much of an issue with it, if this phone dident have the physical keyboard, it would work just fine with the software keyboard and I would be quite content with it.
The camera, well its not the most revoloutionary thing in the world, it takes some pretty decent pictures, it struggles a bit in low light, but if your taking a picture of something small and not in a big dark space the flash can help, and while its not the brightest or the best in a camera phone as I belive my blackberrys flash was awesome and worked quite well for what it was, the droids camera flash will do alright in a quick snap situation. It takes decent video, not the best from a camera phone but for me it would suffice in what I would use it for, Although I wish it was closer to the quality the 3GS’s camera possesses.
Overall I think the phoens great, feels great, looks great and performs great. If you were looking at getting one, id say go for it you wont be dissapointed.