Motorola DROID review (Verizon Wireless)

This interesting article was posted in TIME magazine online.

Posted by Peter Ha Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 4:35 pm

By now you’ve seen Verizon’s iDon’t/DROID Does campaign on TV or on the streets. The first commercial can be found here. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek and Verizon has admitted this, but it does highlight a handful of things that the iPhone clearly cannot do. It should also serve as a clear indication that any rumor of the iPhone moving to the network is now squashed. Or they’re confident enough that Apple won’t hold a grudge. The former scenario is more likely

Motorola’s DROID has a very industrial look and feel to it. Gone are the days of lightweight and dainty devices. You don’t have to coddle the DROID or shell out an extra $30 for a case. Wrapped mostly in metal, the DROID is chock-full of features that have become standard on ‘smartphones’ or whatever else you want to call these mini computers. Here’s a quick rundown on features and specs:

Network: Verizon Wireless (CDMA 1X 800/1900, EVDO rev. A)
Operating System: Android v2.0
Processor: Arm Cortex A8 processor 550mHz
Memory: 256MB built-in, ships with 16GB microSD card (expandable to 32GB)
Display: 3.7-inch capacitive touchscreen (480×854)
Camera: 5-megapixel with dual-LED flash, auto-focus and image stabilization
Browser: Webkit HTML5, Flash Player 10.1 ready (coming soon)
GPS: aGPS/sGPS
Bluetooth: v2.1+EDR
Wi-Fi: 802.11b/g
Battery: 1400 mAh battery
Sensors: proximity, ambient light and eCompass
Size/Weight: 2.4 x 4.6 x 0.5 in., 6 oz.

DROID’s 3.7-inch display is the best looking capacitive touchscreen we’ve ever seen on any device. It renders images and text beautifully. Colors appear to pop right off the screen. In other words, you can read e-mail, browse Web pages, read eBooks or comics for hours without suffering major eye fatigue. Touch response is good and most taps are registered with very little lag or issue. But the DROID is the only Android device running version 2.0, so it’s difficult to say whether or not it’s perfect. There’s very little evidence to dispute this claim, though.

Just below the screen are four touch-sensitive buttons: back, menu, home and search. For some odd reason, Motorola has excluded buttons dedicated to initiate or end phone calls. You’ll have to initiate the dialer from one of three home screens that you can use to populate various applications or widgets. The buttons are awkwardly placed and often times, we inadvertently tapped the search button when doing anything one-handed (right hand of course). A short tap of the search button will bring up Google Search and the virtual keyboard. A long press initiates Google’s Voice Search, which works amazingly well. The rest of the buttons are pretty self-explanatory. Home takes you back to the home screen and so on.

Underneath the screen is an offset full QWERTY keyboard and directional pad. Anyone used to a BlackBerry or Sidekick will feel at home with the DROID’s keyboard, but will quickly find that it doesn’t offer the same experience. The keys are a tad cramped and there isn’t enough tactile feedback making it difficult to know where your thumbs are without having to look down. It works and is by no means a deal breaker, but depending on how big or small your hands, you’ll want to check one out in person. The directional pad is great for navigating through mobs of text but doesn’t offer much else

On top of the DROID, you’ll find the on/off switch and 3.5mm headset jack. Around the upper right corner on the right rail, the chintzy volume switch does it what it needs to do. The lower left corner is where the camera button has been placed in all its brown sugar colored glory.
Moving to the back of the device you’ll find the 5-megapixel camera and brown sugar colored speaker. The camera is horrible. Probably the worst of any phone on the market and there are a lot of bad camera phones on the market. Start up takes a long time, focusing takes even longer if it can even manage to focus and then you may as well pull out the La-Z-Boy while it takes the image. However, we’re confident that an over-the-air (OTA) update will remedy the situation as it doesn’t appear to be a hardware issue and mainly a software one. The jury is out until Motorola tries to fix this flaw.

First and foremost, the DROID is a phone, which is something people seem to forget when fawning over the latest devices. Does it make it phone calls? Yes. Will you experience dropped calls like your iPhone user friends? No. Verizon’s 3G network is the nation’s largest and it’s close to perfect. The caller and receiver sound crisp and clear. The speakerphone is loud and clear.
Shoddy battery life from any 3G device with GPS, a Web browser, Wi-Fi are commonplace, but the DROID seems to be ahead of the pack. Mileage will vary here, but light Web browsing, sporadic app usage, background tasks, a phone call or two and Gmail will have you running anywhere from 10-14 hours. Certain measures can be taken to lengthen your battery life, like switching from 3G to EDGE (d’oh), lowering screen brightness and turning off GPS, but it’s something we all have to deal with these days.

From a hardware standpoint, the DROID flies but the software will either take advantage of the hardware in a manner that offers a flawless user experience or it’ll crap its pants trying to take a picture.

You can read the rest of the review at TIME magazine website by visiting  http://nerdworld.blogs.time.com/2009/11/05/motorola-droid-review-verizon-wireless/?techsilly=yes