Motorola Droid – 1 Week Later

I have been promising a review of the Motorola DROID, not that I really need to since the phone is just plain awesome and there are literally thousands of reviews online now from industry sources, but this one is my opinion not one done in a lab by a reviewer that most likely has had an iPhone stuck to his/her hip for the last year and is a little jaded (PCMAG and CNET).

We’ll start with the Un-boxing and first impressions.
The phone itself is heavy, after using my Motorola Q for the last 2 years with the extended battery, it pales in contrast to the Droid, we’re only talking ounces but it’s got some bulk none the less and is noticeable. Now the reality is that it only takes about 2 minutes to get used to it so this isn’t really a major issue. iPhone converts will have no issue with this as it’s been said to be only a fraction heavier than the iPhone and it’s mostly due to the slider keyboard.

About the slider, it’s awkward, since there is a navigation button on the right, it offsets the keys to the left, which means that unless the fingers on your right hand are longer than the fingers on your left, it’s an odd feel to use. I’ve never been much of a fan of the touch-typing screen but have suddenly grown to love it, especially since the Droid prompts you with several anticipated words that it thinks you might be typing so you only have to type a few letters and pick the word you want, speeds things up quite a bit.

The Phone
Pro: Let’s face it, in the end it’s still a phone and this one excels! The audio is superb, loud and crystal clear, on a scale of 1 to 10 it’s an 11, and the speaker phone is phenomenal as well!

Con:
The Bluetooth implementation seems to lack a way to get contacts into another device, my head unit in my truck requires that each contact be moved one by one, this phone has no way to do this so I’m unable to click the dial button on my steering wheel and say ‘Call So and So’, it’s an annoyance that they need to fix and fast!

Connect the Dots!
This admittedly is the coolest security feature I’ve seen on a phone, ever. You actually draw a pattern on the phone keypad to un-lock it, this isn’t an app either, it’s included on the standard security settings, you just need to enable it.

Navigation with Google Maps
This is one of the key features that makes this phone amazing, it’s already replaced by TomTom 730 as my new GPS but it has some cons that I’ll go over after the pros.

Pros: Once in the car dock the phone automatically reverts to the Car Screen Mode, press the Voice Navigation button and say where you want to go to. I’ve tried this with a myriad of addresses ranging from Navigate to Safeway and Navigate to a numerical address, it picked them up perfectly each time! Another really cool thing is that it picks up from my contacts, I have the address for a customer listed in his contact information, I simply said “Navigate to: Customer Name” and the Droid found his name, picked his address and planned the route, then changed to 3D Nav, added Google Live Traffic for the entire route and got me to the door! The map will overlay Google Traffic and just like on the TV Commercial, once you get close to the destination, if Google Maps has a picture of it, the map changes to that picture to show you where you should be, this is super cool!

Cons: My TomTom shows me speed and plainly shows current time, estimated time of arrival and actual minutes to arrival, I’ve grown so used to looking at the TomTom for my speed that I now have to remember to look at my cars speedometer which thanks to the TomTom I know is 4 miles per hour high, it’s an annoyance that you can’t customize the GPS Nav screen. Another issue is that you can’t store, or I haven’t figured out a way to store waypoints like on most GPS units, so I guess that I have to add contacts with addresses.

When you’re in NAV mode the phone will remain online, if you exit the phone will time out and go into sleep mode so if you just want to look at the moving map while you drive, you have to change the power settings on your phone or it will sleep and the only way to wake it up is to press the top button (now on it’s side in the car kit) which is awkward and re-enter your security buttons, annoying and cumbersome at highway speeds.

Otherwise this is like having Google Maps with you at all times and running in real time with GPS accuracy. I love this feature in the phone and best again, it’s not an APP it comes with the standard install.

5mp Camera
This is one area that I’m not going to go too deep into, phone cameras in general suck and 5mp is cool but I’ve tried over and over to get an AMAZING picture that would compel me to not travel with my Nikon and honestly, hasn’t happened so all I will say is, don’t give away your real camera just yet.

Web Browsing
Something really cool about this, when I setup the phone I noticed that I was using 3G in the house and sites were coming up pretty fast which was nice, I then setup the phone to use my home network WiFi and saw where the 3G indicator went away and was replaced by the WiFi indicator! Suddenly the sites were really popping so I ran a SpeedTest and was getting 2M down and 800K up, this is just like being on my laptop, the WiFi card in this phone is solid and includes all the security I have on my network so I was very impressed.

Sites look incredible in both wide and vertical modes and some of the included or down loadable apps for things like Facebook, Flixster (Movie Site), Google Finance, Bank of America and a host of others, really work solid on this web interface.

Everyone raves about the display on this phone and it truly is amazing, very high quality, more pixels than anything on the market today and just eclipses the iPhone so major kudos on this one!

Get in Sync
This phone doesn’t have an iTunes style app, yet and unless you’re experienced with directory trees and drag drop from your PC to a device, you might find it odd on how to get music or movies on to this device. Yes you can download from Amazon (again built in app) but what if you have some music that you want to transfer and fill up the generous 16GB included memory card, you have to know how to get into the phone from your PC via USB and then create the correct directories. Was no issue to me but to some it may prove frustrating.

The phone will play anything without DRM so any MP3′s or MP4 movies that don’t have DRM will play. One odd and missing item that is supposed to be fixed in the December 11th software push is that the music player has no STOP button, it can FF and REW as well as PAUSE but no stop or skip to the next song, odd!

That’s all I can really say about this device based on person experience, it’s truly awesome, very fast and responsive and a stunning quality screen, the learning curve is about 1 hour for a techie, maybe a day for someone that’s not a geek like me. For the price and the functionality, get this phone, if you’re a die-hard iPhone fan who sold their soul to Apple, not sure how it’s going to fit your needs but who knows, that part is totally up to you.

Here are some pics including a pic taken with the 5mp camera.