The Hardware
The phone is made of two pieces, the display and the keyboard, it has a 3.7 inch capacitive touch screen with a resolution of 480×854. It has an ARM Cortex A8 CPU (a 600MHz OMAP3430 chip down-clocked to 550MHz), 256MB of RAM, 512MB of ROM and comes with a 16GB microSD card. The device is speedy, and is similar in specs to the Palm Pre and iPhone 3GS, but I was somewhat surprised that some of the functions like pulling down the notification shade was a little too sluggish for my tastes.
The screen is quite impressive, and most gestures registered with little to no lag time, however the lack of multitouch is a definite turn off for me. Android 2.0 supports multitouch, but it isn’t on this device.
For some people, the reason they don’t use the iPhone is the lack of a physical keyboard, however the keyboard on this phone is nice, but I found myself typing faster on the iPhone than using the keyboard on the Droid, the keys were flat and hard to type with, I had to use the thumbnail method to get any decent typing done, I don’t know what would make it better, but before I had my iPhone I had an HTC Wizard, and the keyboard was great, the keys were bigger and curved out, and I could type without having to check every key pressed.
The camera is a 5 megapixel autofocus camera with led flash, and it’s capable of shooting video, however the camera takes forever to autofocus, and the results can be quite unpredictable. The video was decent enough, but they need to get the formats out of war, and it should be able to do h.264 mpeg, but instead it uses the 3gp format.
The sound from the speaker/earpiece was great, weather it be music or a speakerphone call, but on any Motorola device I have had, the speakers have been good.
The Software
Since this is my first time with the Android software platform, I don’t have much to compare it with. That said, here is my take on Android 2.0.
Android is furnished by Google, so it’s kind of a no-brainer that it will sync with your Google accounts, as well as Facebook and Exchange (I don’t have an exchange server so I wasn’t able to test this feature). After putting in my Google account information it pulled my contacts, email and calendar into the phone with no other work besides entering my username and password. There is a limitation to the calendar support for Google is that it only syncs the ones from your main Google account, not any secondary ones you have.
The Google Maps app adds the new Google Navigation, this was one of the nicest features, and it got me around ok, however putting it side by side with TomTom, I didn’t always get the same routes, and TomTom would get me there faster most of the time. I did however like the satellite view and the street view when you arrived at your destination, and hopefully Apple will allow Google to put their navigation app in the app store or update the native maps app to allow the new Google Navigation and the biggest gripe, pinch to zoom, please add multi touch, the zooming absolutely sucks without multi-touch.
The browser is good, and it displayed sites as good as Safari on the iPhone, and loading times were decent, however I did notice there was a significant delay after I hit the enter button when I put in a search or a site. Another downside is no multi touch, you have to double tap or hit the zoom buttons to zoom in, and it doesn’t always zoom to the right location.
The camera itself is decent, and it has more controls like white balance, focus mode and color, but the app itself is unresponsive and not good to use, please fix this soon.
Another thing that they need to work on is the multimedia support, yes you can drag and drop music to the phone, and it works fine, but the video support is horrible, the video player is hidden in the Gallery app, and it wouldn’t play videos that weren’t formatted in the 3gp format. This is a big setback if you want to use your phone for more than just music.
The Android market was fairly straightforward and easy to use, and it has over 10,000 apps to choose from, except if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for it’s kind of tedious to browse the categories. Another setback of the Android platform is that apps can’t be installed on an SD card and the storage limit for apps is 256MB on the Droid, so that limits developers.
Final Thoughts
It may sound like I don’t like Android, but I do, and with some work it’s got great potential. I like the multitasking and integrating with your Google accounts. It’s a lot easier to use than Windows Mobile, and if you aren’t able to get an iPhone, then I would recommend this phone. The phone is user friendly enough that non smart phone users won’t have any problems using it, and Android is definitely a good platform.
1. Integration with Google is great and the native Google apps are awesome
2. Web browsing is good and websites display like they should
3. No native way to sync music
4. Video and music player are downright awful
5. Was sluggish at random times and randomly rebooted
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