Motorola Droid: 1 week review

Our verizon wireless contract was ending in march so I had been doing alot of research into phone replacements. I was ready for a smartphone of some sort and was really looking hard at android devices. I wasn't against switching networks, so all the major phones were in play. I ended up narrowing it down to a handful, however:

• iPhone on AT&T
• Droid on Verizon
• myTouch on T-Mobile
• Nexus One on T-Mobile

I'm sure this will come as a surprise to some of you who know me, but despite my affinity for Apple, I ruled out the iPhone pretty early on. I wasn't eager to switch to AT&T's much-maligned network, for one. But I had other misgivings about the device that I'll go into with another post.

I really wanted the Nexus One but Google/T-Mobile didn't sell it at subsidized price ($180) with family plans. So that became cost prohibitive.

So the real choice was between the myTouch on T-mobile and the Droid on Verizon. The Droid really outclasses the myTouch in terms of hardware and software (it has a newer release of the android OS). Also Verizon's 3G coverage is much more robust than T-mobile's. T-Mobile does have cheaper plans and, historically, we spend more minutes talking to people on T-mobile's network (abby's family) than on verizon (my family). Though that might not be the case anymore.

That was were my head was during super-bowl weekend. I had pretty much made up my mind and was just waiting for new developments in the market (such as T-Mobile's recent myTouch hardware refresh). But that saturday abby spilled water in her purse and drowned her existing phone. Our hand was forced and the easiest/least expensive thing to do was to stick with verizon and renew our contract.

So we both got Droids and have had them for a little over a week. I wanted to give my initial impressions. I'll try to separate them as best I can into hardware vs software.

I'll also be comparing it, fairly or not, to my first-gen iPod Touch. It's my only real basis of comparison.

On the hardware side, there's alot to love. First and foremost: the screen. It's really great. It's bright, crisp and the font rendering is beautiful. The touch accuracy is so-so, but i'm not sure if this is a software issue.

The first thing that struck me about the phone itself was how heavy it was. It's hefty. But I find this to be an endearing quality. The device feels more substantial than heavy in your hands. I actually find that its weight keeps it from flying around my car like my iPod does. But the iPod isn't a phone either, and surely has a much smaller battery and less hardware packed in the case. So that's probably an unfair comparison.

It took me about 30 minutes to realize how glad I was that the Droid has a hardware keyboard. I never was comfortable using the on-screen keyboard on the Touch even though I got proficient with it. When you need software assistance to aid your accuracy, there's something inherently wrong with the concept. The Droid's keyboard isn't perfect, but I can type long messages with making only minimal mistakes and not get frustrated with the speed of my typing. Some people complain about the d-pad pushing the keyboard off-center in your hands, but I don't find this to be very troubling. maybe if I had smaller hands it would be an issue.

The call clarity is much better than my outgoing phone and I think it picks up a signal a little better too. Despite Verizon's superior network, we get mediocre signal strength in our house (which kinda sucks since we don't have a land-line). At least we do get 3G. The speaker on the Droid is as good as advertised. Putting calls on speaker result is clear communication (both ways, I think considering I haven't had trouble with people understanding me).

I've had zero problems with the Droid picking up my wireless G network at home. It always connects without problem and gets good throughput. It would be nice if i could use wi-fi for VOIP. Get on it, Google.

This being my first 3G device, I have a hard time quantifying the network speed. I will say that It feels much snappier than expected but that might be because of hardware processing speed being better than my iPod touch. Simple pages load quite fast and the only lagging sites are multimedia-heavy sites like ESPN.com. Downloads from the Android Market are surprisingly fast as well. I guess I can only say that I'm not at all disappointed in 3G network performance and haven't yet noticed any network lag.

The camera has been underwhelming so far. The flash was really hyped in its comparison to the iPhone but I've found it mostly useless. Photos taken in low-light are very grainy and distorted, even with the flash. I'm witholding judgement here until I can take photos in the daylight. I also haven't yet tried to take video yet.

My only real hardware gripe with the Droid is it's flimsy wake/sleep button. Unlike the one on the Touch, the droid's is recessed and situated next to the headphone jack making it hard to find by feel. The other two physical buttons are pretty flimsy too and are too easily pressed by mistake. The volume button is nice to have, but I could do without the dedicated camera button.


On the software side theres alot of ground to cover.

I'll start out by saying Android is really the linux of handheld OS's with all that that implies. And that makes since, I guess, since it's based on linux. But more than just the nuts-and-bolts underpinnings, the UI skews more towards the kitchen-sink linux approach than the refined and streamlined apple experience. But what really makes Android feel like (desktop) linux is that things just stop working randomly and problem feedback is inconsistent. I'm a computer geek who has used desktop linux alot in the past so my tolerance for this kind of thing is probably higher than joe-average consumer.

On the other hand, Abby doesn't seem to have as many problems as I do, so perhaps these problems are a result of me being a geek. I have installed and run many more apps than Abby does which is probably what gums up the works. So that's worth noting.

I'll start with the good.

Overall, it's much easier to navigate through Android than with mobile OSX. But that's by design on Apple's part. Android has back-button and a app switcher function concepts that don't exist in OSX. It's nice to be able to hit that back-button and go back to what you were doing in another app. For example, the twitter client will forward you off to the browser and you can hit back to go back to twitter. In OSX, twitterific had to create an in-app web browser to enable this same behavior (which, admittedly, works better in some situations. But that's more overhead on the developer's end).

So Android just has more range of motion within the UI that Apple lacks. The Apple approach is nice in some respects, however, because you don't have to keep track of where you are and what your'e doing. Just hit the one big button to start your next action. Of course this same behavior is available within Android too.

The maps/navigation features are really good. I have a 4 year old garmin handheld GPS that I have used for driving navigation in the past and the android features really out-class it. That's probably unfair because the garmin 1) is not a dedicated driving device and 2) it's pretty old. But having the Android navigation pull maps/data(/traffic!) from the internet and not having to store anything locally is a killer feature (and all for freesies!). These maps also look fantastic on the Droid's screen.

I've only used the turn-by-turn directions a couple times, but so far, the directions haven't been bad. They're better than my Garmin's routing at least.

Google Latitude, on the other hand is underwhelming. I was hoping to use it to keep track of abby's location and vise-versa but it seems to only update your location to friends when maps are active and even then it sends out your location too infrequently to be of any real use.

Accounts integration has been mostly positive. All my google account info gets pulled in of course, but so do my facebook contacts. I was able to add my work exchange account and get access to my work email and calendar, but so far haven't been able to get contacts. But I think this is a problem with my exchange server since I don't get contacts on my mac either.

The browser is good enough. I do miss the multitouch features in mobile safari, but I hear those features are getting enabled with Android 2.1 (which should be coming for the Droid any day now). I miss having multiple windows/tabs like mobile safari has also.

Similarly, the google talk app, messaging (texting) app, gmail app, email app, and calendar apps (two separate apps for normal and "corporate") are all very adequate. They let me get done what I want to get done and I have no complaints about them.

My biggest complaint about the Android platform is also one of its biggest strengths: multi-tasking apps. I love being able to run multiple apps at once, but I also want to be able to control when they don't run. Apps universally lack a 'close' function so there is no way of killing these processes from within the apps themselves. The only way I can kill apps/processes is by using a third party utility which gets old fast.

I've also noticed the Droid getting bogged down when switching things out of memory when I have too many apps open. The phone will get sluggish and I have to start killing apps to get things to run smoothly again.

On several occasions I've had to reboot the device to get things working again. I've even had problems with the phone functions -- functions that should be rock solid on what is still, first and foremost, a phone. I don't want my phone capabilities diminished by running too many other apps.

I think the Apple approach of limiting multi-tasking and using a push notifications framework for notifications is probably a smarter/more effective smartphone ecosystem. But I'll withhold final judgement until Google has time to iron out their bugs.


On the whole, I'm happy with the Droid so far. I'm hopeful that verizon/motorola will stay committed to keeping the device updated with Android updates. But if they don't, I'm prepared to hack it and install unofficial Android builds. I think that Android is still in its infancy as a platform and needs to cook a little more before it can truly rival Apple's sophistication and quality user experience. That's not to say that it's not a viable platform now, because it is. But it also has flaws that need to be corrected.

My fear is that Google is following the Microsoft model of putting a generic OS on top of variable hardware. This has been a real thorn for Microsoft and caused most of windows' reliability problems. Maybe Google is smarter than microsoft and will handle this complexity better. They've definitely outsmarted Microsoft at every other turn for the last decade.