I was finally able to get my hands on a Motorola Droid. I know I am a bit late in the “first impressions” game, but I believe I have some valuable and unique opinions.
I found the phone to be very laggy. Usually I can tolerate some lag as long as it is between applications. I am willing to wait, for example, 2-3 seconds to wait my email to open. I am not, however, willing to wait 2-3 seconds every time I want to scroll through my calender—or even my list of applications. The Droid seemed to almost “mini freeze” every 30 seconds or so regardless of activity. It never froze for more than 3 seconds and usually it was only a momentary pause in the motion onscreen, but still, it really interrupted my experience.
On the positive side, the build quality, like many before me have said, is superb. I can say I was genuinely surprised at how solid it felt in the hand. The slider mechanism isn’t the stiffest I’ve felt (it was a bit loose) but overall very solid feeling.
The phone also looks really nice. I wish I had a more descriptive adjective, but the appearance of the phone is fairly non-specific. That is not to say it is generic looking either. It definitely has a unique style but it is neither sexy, classy, edgy, or pretty. It’s a combination of all four really.
The keyboard, on the other hand, is very mediocre. The keys are amply sized but their spacing and shape is all wrong. While they have a nice enough click, they aren’t raised enough at all to differentiate between keys with your fingers. I found myself constantly pressing multiple keys at once without even feeling it—and I don’t have particularly large fingers at all. The spacebar also feels a bit strange. It somehow feels to small for the phone. Although I rarely missed actually hitting the button, it always caused me some level of anxiety since I frequently would hit its edge. Finally, the overall shape of the phone gave me an uncomfortable typing experience. I often felt my hands kind of cramped. I never really found a comfortable way to hold the phone while typing.
Now obviously there are many pros to the phone that other reviewers have found, and I generally agree with them. The screen is bright and beautiful and also very responsive. Android 2.0 is just as nice of an OS as every says. I didn’t quite have enough time to really fully explore the OS, but graphically and functionally it is quite nice. I found it occasionally counter-intuitive to navigate, but nothing that would ever prevent me from buying the phone.
Overall this is a great phone and while I did not get a chance to put it through rigorous tests, I feel confident in saying that if you’re on Verizon and looking for something new and different the Droid very well may be the phone for you.
