I’ve had my Moto Droid since friday afternoon, so I thought it was about time to get some thoughts posted. Overall I love the phone, its by far the best Android device out there, and maybe the best smartphone of them all.
First, I’ll talk about the phone, and then (of course) the obligatory comparison to Apples phone.
I moved to Droid from T-Mobile’s MyTouch 3g, so I was already very familiar with Android and its pros and cons. Droid comes with Android 2.0, and there are a lot of great new features. The look and feel are a bit different, and things are smoother overall. A couple of highlights:
– Contacts now sync with Facebook, this was pretty cool. Any contact that it could find in my Facebook account would be linked, and their facebook photo is set as their contact photo. Also, anytime I do anything with a linked contact, like open an SMS thread, etc, their FB status is displayed by their pic.
– New contact pop-up short cuts. In you are looking at your contact list and click a contacts photo, a little slider pops up with shortcuts to FB, SMS, Email, etc.
– New “Corporate Calendar” that finally lets you sync your Exchange calendar to the device. This is so great, totally needed as well.
– You can now have MULTIPLE ActiveSync accounts in a unified inbox!
On to the hardware. Droid isn’t going to win any beauty contests, and if an iPhone was a Ferrari, this would be a Ford F-150. Functional and not ugly, but very boxy. This boxiness makes the phone look bigger than it is. In fact it’s almost exactly the size of an iphone, and only slightly longer than my MyTouch 3G. Its a heavy phone and feels very solid. Most of the phone is glass and metal, so that is nice. The gold accents I could do without, I think silver would have been better. But its not horrid.
The camera is very good, and the flash works well. Video recording is pretty amazing and the playback looks awesome.
That awesomeness can be directly attributed to the totally gorgeous screen. It really is jaw dropping. Everything from icons to text look smooth and perfectly rendered. Photos look great, and given the pixel count, viewing large webpages is much better than any other phone I’ve used.
Battery life seems to be pretty good as well. Not quite as good as the MyTouch, but better than the 3GS. I have Bluetooth and GPS on all the time, as well as syncing facebook, gmail, exchange. Today I sent 75+ sms messages, ~30min talk time, several emails, took a few pictures, and used the GoogleNav for about 30min. My batt lasted from 930am to just after midnight (and that was the 20% warning). So quite good. Nav uses a lot of batt as the screen is always on, GPS is continuous, and the app is constantly calculating your location and updating a map. I have a car adapter and I think I would always use that when navigating to keep the batt useage at bay.
So lets get to the comparison. Droid has 4 killer features that the iPhone (or Pre) can’t match – Verizon, Google Nav, high res screen, google voice input.
Lets face it, ATT’s network looks like a child with tinker toys built it compared to Verizon. I have consistent 3G coverage literally everywhere, inside, outside, driving, etc. Places that ATT always dropped calls I have no problems keeping a call up. 3G speeds are very fast and always reliable. I no longer live in fear of going from 5 bars to nothing on a random whim (see my previous ATT postings).
GoogleNav is pure awesome. Other nav companies should be very afraid. Directions are very accurate, the on screen display of the route is excellent, and the animations are good. The huge plus is that it links right into google maps, so you can get all sorts of other information along your route. And with traffic, you can know when to tell the system to re-route you. Oh, and every turn can be viewed in street view with the route overlaid. And its free, wow. Granted iPhone may get this as well, so it might not be a killer app for too long.
The screen is amazing. At almost 3 times the resolution, but about the same size as the iphone, it easily wins here. Apple needs to get a hi rez iphone goings soon.
Google voice input is very very handy. Click the icon and say anything, from “navigate to starbucks” or “how much does an african swallow weigh” and google will find it. Using the “navigate” keyword will cause the phone to start GoogleNav and route you to the local. It even worked perfectly with a street address, or something more vague like “Navigate to Old Chicago Restaurant”. Oh, and you can do voice activated dialing of course. The only thing I can think of that should be done is to add voice to text to email or sms text inputs so you could speak and then send.
Of course there are some problems too. IPhone still has the better on screen keyboard, although Droid’s is better than previous android phones.
The quality of the apps are no up to the same par as Apple (yet). I think given the number of new android phones coming to market this will change, but so far its just not as good.
The IM apps for Android aren’t quite as pretty as iPhone, there is still nothing asl slick as Bejive.
The other features of Android that I find better than iPhone are the same as before… so my previous postings still hold true.
So, I am very happy with this phone. Verizon is just so nice, and given the screen res and google nav, I can’t see how I could go to an iPhone every again. iPhone wins on music/itunes, and a more consistent (but simpler) OS flow. But Droid seems like a real phone to accomplish things – nav, lots of email accounts, great sms, etc. The iPhone feels like a game box with a “phone” built in. This is a huge step for Android, and Verizon.