 "Photo: Image Courtesy of Motorola")
For the past four years, I have been a blackberry man, but when I switched service providers to Verizon, I decided to try something a little bit different. Enter the Motorola Droid, one of the newest phones on the market. With a sleek design and 3.7” high-resolution screen, this is one beautiful piece of technology.
The Droid uses the new Google operating system, Android 2.0 and bases the phone’s functionality around Google applications such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Youtube, and others. Upon my first experience with the Droid, the most obvious difference between my old Blackberry Pearl and the Droid is the touch screen. Not only does the touch screen make accessing applications on your phone super quick, but its just plain cool!
On the original iPhone and other touch screen phones, a major downfall is the ‘fat finger syndrome’ as I like to call it, where the flat screen makes it very difficult to type numbers or texts without accidentally pressing the wrong key. The Droid eliminates this problem with the thinnest flip-out QWERTY keyboard currently on the market.
The layout of the alphabetical characters and numbers are like that of a traditional keyboard, but certain commonly used symbols like a question mark or coma is placed on the keyboard so there is no need to access a symbol menu or press shift to use them. In keeping true to my Blackberry roots, one reason I chose the Droid over the iPhone is for its functionality. It is true that the iPhone certainly has features to make work and life easier and more efficient, the phone is designed around providing a multimedia experience.
The Droid can hold its own with the iPhone when it comes to media with a 5-megapixel camera, 16GB MicroSD, DVD quality video camera, 480x854 display, and 3.5mm headphone jack, but the Android OS has more of a Blackberry feel, in terms of getting work done. The Droid Market offers tons of both free and paid applications to download for news, finance, sports, and of course games and multimedia. With all of the great features the Motorola Droid offers, the phone still has a few faults.
The current version of the Android OS does not allow the user to set the entire phone to vibrate mode without setting each notification separately. At the moment, I have all of my notifications such as texts, emails, and calls to vibrate along with the standard sounds I use. If I want the phone to only vibrate and not play a sound, I just put it in silent mode, but if I did not preset my notifications to vibrate, I could not do this in one action.
The only other problem I have run into with the phone is the location of the ringer volume, which is on the right-hand side like many other phones. However, since the phone uses a slide-out keyboard, it is very easy to either turn the volume up or down beyond the intended level by mistake. This can be particularly irritating when in situations where accidentally turning the ringer volume on can be inappropriate.
When it is all said and done, the Motorola Droid is something like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. The Droid is one bad phone. Droid users can only hope that the next Android update will take care of some of the minor inconveniences and make this phone nearly flawless.
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