Motorola Droid Review

So, here’s the review. It’s a bit later than I expected to post it, but I decided to give the phone some time to let me not only get used to it but to let it run more than just ‘out of the box’ to see how it goes after some use. So here we are, 2 months later, and I’m finally posting this review.
This phone is great. I’m loving the Android OS on the phone, it’s nice and slick and easy to navigate. Finding functions and options inside the OS is intuitive and easy to do. The phone functionality is nice and easy, though once or twice I have encountered the odd ‘echo’ effect described by a couple people, but it seems rare for me and doesn’t really detract from the call quality.

The large amount of applications available on the Android Market makes it extremely easy to find an application to do almost anything, from post to Twitter to playing games. A good majority of the applications out there are free, though some of them come in a ‘lite’ free version and a paid version, where the paid version usually has a couple extra features and isn’t ad-supported. The ads themselves though are usually placed out of the way so they don’t interfere with functionality at all, which is a kudos to the application developers in thinking about the user interface function for that.

The only problem I’ve encountered with the phone so far was the result of an application that had started to crash portions of the OS, which was simply resolved by removing the faulty application, returning everything to normal. Nothing else has given me problems yet.

Battery life is excellent, giving me an entire day on a battery charge even while using applications like FourSquare and ITweet on a fairly regular basis. This is doubly impressive when I’m at work and I’ve got absolutely poor signal, which eats up even more battery as the phone’s constantly reaching out to keep a connection to a tower, and it’s constantly flipping back and forth between 1X and 3G. I usually take it off the charger at 7am, and it doesn’t go back on the charger til about 11:30 pm, at which point it’s still got between 20 and 40 percent battery life still remaining. On the days where I’m at home and I’ve got constantly good signal, I’ll usually plug it in at night while it still has around 70 percent battery life remaining, so battery life is phenomenal.

The only major gripe I have about the hardware itself is the keyboard. Whoever designed this keyboard either had really tiny fingers that were really sensitive or someone miscounted in a ‘key height’ category somewhere, because the keyboard is pretty much flat. There is barely any definition between the keys so you tend to mis-key quite often. The on-screen keyboard, especially in landscape mode, more than makes up for this deficiency though, and I find myself using it all the time.

All in all, the Droid is an amazing phone. It does lack some of the functionality that something like Windows Mobile might have in terms of dealing with a more corporate environment, but it does support Exchange functionality for email and (I presume) calendar functions. The phone is more suited to the mobile ‘networking’ people to me than a corporate entity, but I’m sure if some corporation out there really wanted to use the Android platform that they would build their own apps to do what they needed to do on the phones.

I heartily recommend the Droid to anyone looking for a new phone.