Electronics
The screen is awesome – bigger than an iPhone’s and more dense with pixels, so images are very sharp. The colors are great, and the screen is nice and bright. I had a Samsung Rogue for about 10 days. Everyone raved about the Rogue’s screen. The Droid’s screen blows it away. The touch screen is accurate and responsive, and very intuitive to use. About as good as the iPhone but much better than every other touchscreen phone I’ve tried and better than a few cameras with touchscreen controls.
The Droid’s display is sharp enough and wide enough to view most web pages – including those not specifically formatted for mobile phone browsers. Because of this screen and because of the way that the Android OS implements the browser, surfing the internet is very easy, intuitive, and pleasant. Much less horizontal scrolling/panning. Much better than most phones I’ve tried, including the Samsung Rogue and Blackberry. The iPhone’s browser is also a pleasure to use, but the Droid’s screen is better at displaying full web pages.
Email is very well-implemented in the Droid. I was already a Gmail and Google calendar user before getting my Droid, and the level of integration is amazing, thanks to the Google Android OS. But any Android phone will also handle most other popular webmail, like hotmail, and also can sync with Microsoft Outlook and similar programs.
The Droid’s call quality is good, and the speakerphone is loud and clear enough to be useful in most places. I get slightly better reception with the Droid than with my previous Verizon phones, especially in places with poor network coverage.
The Droid’s built-in Facebook app is good, but is not as full-featured as the iPhone’s FB app, which has been around longer and had more time to be improved. Yet, the Droid’s FB app is as good as or better than FB access I’ve seen on most smartphones, including Blackberry and especially the new Samsung Rogue.
One extremely cool thing is you can easily import the contact info from all your Facebook friends into the Droid’s contact manager, including their profile photo, email, phone, birthday, etc. Then, from your contact list, you can tap on any of their names and with one touch either call, email, or jump to their FB page. This is very well-implemented and easy to use, and makes the Droid’s contact manager highly useful.
The Droid has pretty good voice recognition. I can tap the microphone icon in the upper right corner of the screen and say “Starbucks” and the Droid will show a list of the nearest Starbucks – and then I can pick one and either touch the phone number and Droid will call it, or I can touch the address and Droid will show its location on a map and give me driving directions.
Droid like all Android phones has Google maps built in, including satellite view, and Droid can give you directions (from your current location or any location) just like Google maps on a computer.
What’s more, Droid has built-in GPS functionality and can give spoken directions, just like a Garmin GPS. I tried it and it works pretty well.
Loading music and photos onto the Droid is as easy as dragging and dropping files from your computer to a thumb drive. Droid’s music player is not as refined as iPod/iPhone, but it is easy to use and works great. If you have an iPod, you probably have lots of music tracks in AAC format. The Droid will play them no problem, as long as they don’t have DRM copy protection (and most don’t nowadays). The Droid also plays MP3 and other formats.
The Droid has the standard 3.5″ headphone jack so you can use it with any earphones, unlike some phones that have a non-standard jack. To judge the sound quality, I listened to the same track on the Droid and on an iPhone. Using $100+ headphones, the sound quality was better on the iPhone, but the difference was harder to notice with cheaper earphones or through my car stereo. Yet, the Droid’s sound quality is as good or better than other music-playing wireless phones, and I’ve tried quite a few.
I have not yet loaded videos on the Droid. But I have watched streaming video, and it is very smooth, studder-free, and looks really great, best I’ve ever seen on any phone, including the iPhone and iPod touch.
The Droid comes with a 16GB microSD card. These normally go for 40 to 50 bucks at least, so I’m really grateful that Verizon and Motorola included it with the phone. It can hold a ton of music, video, and photos. For comparison, the highest-capacity iPod Nano also has 16gb of storage.
Plus, the Droid has internal memory for apps and its own operating system, so your phone will still work in the unlikely event the SD card ever fails. (My Droid worked fine even though the Verizon store guy didn’t insert the SD card correctly when he set up my phone and the phone didn’t recognize it. I reinserted it later and all was fine.)
The Droid’s interface and OS (Android) is not quite as polished as the iPhone’s. But it is still excellent, VERY easy to learn, and very easy to navigate around and use. Like most phones, the Droid is highly customizable (ringtones, wallpapers, placement of your favorite widgets and icons on your home screens), and the Android OS makes it super easy to do so.
The Droid has one-touch access to the Android app market, which has 10,000 apps so far. I’ve downloaded a couple dozen. There are lots of good ones, but overall the Android app market lags the iTunes app store in selection and quality, and specific apps available for both platforms tend to be a little better on the iPhone/iPod touch than on Android.
However, the Android app market is much younger than iTunes app store and is growing very quickly. Until the Droid, there were only a few phones running Android. That number will at least double over the next few months, and the number of people who use phones running Android will more than double, according to industry projections, because of the increasing quality and selection of Android phones on most major carriers. All this will fuel even more rapid growth in the Android app market. But even in its present state, you can find a lot of really useful and fun apps for the Droid, many of which are free.
The physical QWERTY keyboard is not as good as it could be. The keys are flat with no space between them. Still, I’m not a big texter and I find the keyboard fairly easy and pleasant to use. I also find the 5-way rocker button on the keyboard to be very useful. But if I were a big texter, I might not like the keyboard as much. So, my advice is to go to your local Verizon store and try out their demo unit.
The 5 megapixel camera has a built-in LED flash. I have taken a couple dozen pictures inside and out, and find the photos to be acceptable, good for a camera phone, but nowhere near as good as a dedicated digital camera, and maybe slightly inferior to the iPhone’s picture quality. The flash is better than nothing, but causes the colors to be off. I have posted 6 pictures I took with the Droid to the “customer images” area so you can see for yourself the quality of photos you get with Droid. Once you snap a picture, you have to wait a couple seconds before Droid will let you take another; this lag is common on camera phones and cheap digital cameras, but seems slightly worse on the Droid.
I have not yet shot any video clips with the Droid, so can’t comment on their quality.
The Droid is 1.5 to 2 ounces heavier than most other smart phones I’ve used or tried. Doesn’t sound like much, but you can definitely notice it. For me, having the bigger screen and keyboard easily justifies the weight, but for some folks, the weight could be an issue. This is another reason why I wouldn’t suggest ordering it online without first seeing it and holding it at your local retailer.
Everyone has different tastes, but I think the Droid is not the most stylish phone. It has kind of a masculine, industrial look to it, which I can tolerate but I’m not crazy about it. But, it is easy to change the wallpaper, and there are a variety of cases for the Droid – more coming out every week – so you can customize the look any way you want.
Popularity: unranked [?]
It’s plastic, very lightweight and easy to move around. That works for me. Soooo easy to clean and disassemble when doing a thorough clean. Immediately after use I rinse it, fill it less than half full with hot water and a drop of liquid detergent, hold the lid down and give it a couple of whirls on pulse. Take it off and shake it around to get the top clean, then rinse again and make sure I open the spout to let it drain. If you don’t clean it right away, you’ll have to scrub it clean. You can disengage the spout, replacing it with the screw cap at the bottom of base, if you don’t want to use the spout. My smoothies are so thick now I just pour it out.
The first few times I used it, I smelled burning rubber but I do push this thing as far as filling it with ice and whatever else I want and doing it as quickly as I can, using the setting that gives me the quickest results, be that pulse or smoothie or whatever. Again, I like this blender so much I figure I’ll replace it with the same if I blow it and it’s not under warranty. So far, so good. (It’s a 3-year warranty.)
No more burning rubber even though I still fill it with ice and a mixture of everything. I’m reading “Green for Life” so I’ve added greens, celery, carrots and other vegetables, chia seed gel, flax seed, a little honey, etc., to my juice and fruit mixtures, both frozen banana and other fresh and frozen fruit, all of these things at the same time. DELICIOUS! My husband didn’t like the vegetables added at first but now he really looks forward to them, which is just about every day or every other day now. The blender works like a charm. It doesn’t pulverize the greens (spinach or romaine lettuce)100%. There’s a small amount of greens that doesn’t get chopped up – but very minute bits that aren’t that noticeable and not worth the price for a higher-priced, “better” blender, as none of them get 5-star reviews anyway and mine works well enough to suit my needs. No problem whatsoever with ice. It has only bogged down on me once, but I just turned it off and nudged it around with wooden spoon and it’s been good to go. Now, if I can remember, I put the ice cubes in after the juice, which is first. Sometimes I put them in last.
Popularity: unranked [?]
